Pioneers in a Conestoga Wagon

The Proskauer family, horse farm owners in Kentucky, collected a wide variety of decorative and folk arts. They acquired American Textiles, weather vanes, whirligigs, folk sculpture, table and mantel ornaments, baskets, ceramic wares, and all kinds of antique toys, including delightful penny banks with moving parts designed to make saving money an enjoyable pastime.

Hand-crafted toys often show the maker’s whimsy. One would expect burly oxen to pull the Pioneers of Conestoga Wagon, a fabric, metal, and painted wood toy from about 1880, but these particular beasts resemble Holstein cows. The toy speaks of an epoch in American history, the tedious overland migration of settlers to the West that reached its height in the 1860s and 1870s.