Holgate Toys

Holgate pioneered the developmental wooden toy in America, working with early childhood educators to design toys that promote learning. Their smooth hardwood toys designed for young children emphasized tactile learning, shape recognition, and motor skills development. Holgate is one of the oldest American toy companies still in operation.

The Holgate brothers, whose Kane, Pennsylvania woodworking business turned to toys — with designer Jarvis Rockwell, brother of Norman Rockwell, shaping the influential preschool range.

Holgate is one of the most important names in American preschool design and one of the least famous. The company was already a wood-products manufacturer when it moved into toys around 1929, and its collaboration with Jarvis Rockwell produced a body of work built on a specific idea: that a toy for a very small child should be simple, hardwood, safely rounded, and should teach one thing at a time.

The results are the shape-sorting toys, peg-people buses, pounding benches, stacking puzzles and pull-along telephones that became the template for American preschool toys and were widely imitated. Holgate worked with early-childhood educators, which is why the toys line up so precisely with developmental stages, and its designs were bought by nursery schools as much as by parents.

The company has continued in Kane, Pennsylvania, still producing wooden toys — a rare survival among American wooden-toy makers, most of which were destroyed by plastic in the 1950s and 1960s.