Abigail Doll of Brown County
Original book dust cover. Sperry family crest. Portia Sperry with doll.
~ by Julia Pearson
Many fourth graders learned about the settling of the Indiana wilderness by reading of the adventures of a young girl named Susan Calvin and a doll companion that was handmade by her grandmother. Abigail, was named for the little ragdoll and was written by Portia Howe Sperry and Lois Donaldson in 1938. The doll came before the book and both were inspired by Portia Sperry.
In 1931, Portia and her family moved to Brown County from Fort Wayne, Indiana in the midst of the Great Depression. Her husband Ralph’ s job ended with the bankruptcy of the piano factory where he worked, followed by the closing of RCA where he briefly designed radio cabinets. Portia described her family’ s decision
to move to Brown County in a story printed in the October, 1934 issue of the Woman’ s Home Companion:
“ I remembered a tiny village we had often passed in the southern part of our state. The folk, hardly more than five hundred in all, seemed kindly …. Somehow my imagination took me straight there, where we could live for far less than in any city. We could have a garden and put vegetables and fruits for winter.”
The Sperrys and their children had to carry water from across the road of their first home in Brown County, and drinking water a quarter of a mile from higher up the hill. At the foot of the hill, they made their garden that summer. With the family toiling together in their plot, her son, Jim asked Portia through a beaming,
dirt-and-sweat streaked smile,“ People say you have to have money to be happy; we haven’ t any money and we just couldn’ t be any happier, could we?”
Ralph worked as a foreman at the Bessire apple orchards and Portia did several odd jobs before being asked by Jack Rogers to manage a small gift shop next to the Nashville House( now Spears Pottery). The family worked together and eventually moved to a more comfortable home. Ralph converted their henhouse into a workshop that winter and restored an old piano for the university.
That first winter inspired Portia to produce a doll for the shop she managed, Brown County Folks. She had been stocking the store with locally produced crafts such as pottery,
24 Our Brown County • May / June 2015