History of Raggedy Ann & Andy

She began as a family rag doll; an old toy, faded and worn, tossed into an attic. And there, the legend goes, a little girl named Marcella found her one wet and rainy day. Her father Johnny Gruelle, saw infinite possibilities in that old plaything, so he repaired her and gave her a name.

Raggedy Ann – Myths and Legends

The exact details of the origins of the Raggedy Ann doll and related stories, which were created by Johnny Gruelle, are not specifically known, although numerous myths and legends about the doll’s origins have been widely repeated. Gruelle biographer and Raggedy Ann historian Patricia Hall notes that the dolls have “found themselves at the center of several legend cycles – groups of stories that, while containing kernels of truth, are more myth than they are history. What makes this even more intriguing is that fact that Johnny Gruelle, either unwittingly or with the great sense of humor he was known for, initiated many of these legends, a number of which are continuously repeated as the factual history of Raggedy Ann and Andy.”

Finding the Old Rag Doll

Hall further explains that according to an often-repeated myth, Gruelle’s daughter, Marcella, brought from her grandmother’s attic a faceless cloth doll on which the artist drew a face, and that Gruelle suggested that Marcella’s grandmother sew a shoe button for a missing eye. Hall says the date of this supposed occurrence is given as early as 1900 and as late as 1914. More likely, as Gruelle’s wife, Myrtle, reported, it was her husband who retrieved a long-forgotten, homemade rag doll from the attic of his parents’ home sometime around the turn of the twentieth century before the couple’s daughter was born. Although the incident is unconfirmed, Myrtle Gruelle recalled, “There was something he wanted from the attic. While he was rummaging around for it, he found an old rag doll his mother had made for his sister. He said then that the doll would make a good story.” Myrtle Gruelle also indicated that her husband “kept the doll in his mind until we had Marcella. He remembered it when he saw her play with dolls … He wrote the stories around some of the things she did. He used to get ideas from watching her.”

The Patent & Marcella’s Death

Additionally, Gruelle did not create Raggedy Ann as a tribute to his daughter following her death at 13 from an infected vaccination; Hall notes Gruelle’s May 28, 1915, U.S. Patent D 47,789 application for the design of the prototype that became the Raggedy Ann doll was already in progress around the time that Marcella fell ill, and the artist received final approval by the U.S. Patent office on September 7, 1915, the same month as Marcella’s death. Nonetheless, the anti-vaccination movement adopted Raggedy Ann as a symbol, though Marcella died from an infected vaccination, not from the side effects of the vaccination itself.

Naming Raggedy Ann

On June 17, 1915, shortly after submitting his patent application for the doll’s design, Johnny Gruelle applied for a registered trademark for the Raggedy Ann name, which he created by combining words from two of James Whitcomb Riley poems, “The Raggedy Man” and “Little Orphant Annie“. (Riley was a well-known Hoosier poet and a Gruelle family friend and neighbor from the years when they resided in Indianapolis. The U.S. Patent Office registered Gruelle’s trademark application (107328) for the Raggedy Ann name on November 23, 1915.

Raggedy Andy

Gruelle soon gave Raggedy Ann a brother named Raggedy Andy, and through the years the two floppy rag dolls acquired many other wonderful storybook friends. All inhabitants of a very special world, where dolls come alive and enjoy magical adventures when no mortals are present or in Gruelle’s familiar words, “the real-for-sure people were gone or fast asleep.”