Ithaca Kitty
Have you ever seen this cat pillow, originally designed as a toy? Reproductions are made today of this historical item. It’s called a Tabby Cat pillow, originally known as the Ithaca Kitty. The reproductions are designed from an 1892 cloth pattern, stuffed and sewn. But this isn’t just any ordinary cat toy. There is a story behind it.
An attorney named William Hazlitt Smith, along with his wife, Celia, who was a skilled sewer and toy designer, and their 2-year-old daughter, Madge, had a cat named Caesar Grimalkin, a gray tabby cat (Grimalkin is a Victorian English word for gray cat). Caesar was a polydactyl cat, a physical anomaly in which a cat is born with more than five toes on one or more of its paws. Caesar had seven toes on both front paws.
The Smiths lived at 116 Oak Avenue in Ithaca, New York, hence the toy’s original name, Ithaca Kitty.
The family were animal lovers and were instrumental during the 1890s in founding their local chapter of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
One evening in 1890, Celia was looking at Caesar and said, “I could make you out of three pieces of cloth!” She asked her sister-in-law, Charity Smith, an accomplished local painter and children’s book illustrator, to paint a likeness of Caesar that Celia could use to design her toy. However, Caesar would not remain still long enough for Charity to complete the task, so he was instead brought to a local photography studio, where his picture was taken. The family was said to have had laughs years later while reminiscing of holding Caesar upside down so that Charity could paint the image of his seven toes.
Though the family loved their cat, Celia felt Caesar’s extra toes were ‘unseemly,’ and chose not to include them in her toy design. The Ithaca Kitty was patented in October 1892. Celia sold her design to Arnold Print Works in Massachusetts, which sold the printed pattern on half a yard of muslin for 10 cents each, which people could purchase to stuff and sew their own Ithaca Kitty, which at this time had its name changed to the Tabby Cat.
The Tabby Cat became enormously popular nationwide as nearly 200,000 patterns were sold during the 1892 holiday season. The toy came in different sizes, ranging from 6” tall to 15” tall. It was featured at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, further spreading its popularity and creating a fad for plush toys in the United States that lasted from the 1890s through the 1910s.
In some instances the Tabby Cat was seen as more than a toy. Thought to be so realistic looking as to be mistaken for a real cat, farmers placed the toy in their fields to scare off birds, and police placed it in their stations to scare off mice.
