During numerous archaeological excavations in the Virginia City National Historic Landmark District (1990-2012), we were able to retrieve a great deal of evidence of children and what they played with. This formed the core of a chapter in my book, Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past (2012); I have posted the chapter dealing with childhood here. I just posted the chapter for this answer; it may take my profile page with academia.edu a few minutes to post.

Boys being boys, they often lost or broke their toys (to be fair, so did the girls, so the issue is really about simply being young!). Many of the toys we uncovered would seem familiar to modern children. Marbles were ubiquitous. We also found this charming metal rider on a horse, designed to rock. In another example, we uncovered a badly rusted and decomposed wagon, complete with horse. This is the exact counterpart of a modern tor car: wheels turned, and the axel even rotated so the horse could draw the wagon around turns.

Parts from broken dolls were more common than toys that might be associated with boys, but sometimes gender is less clear. This paper airplane dates to the first years of the twentieth century. It was found beneath floorboards of the Fourth Ward School, swept there during work on the floor (together with a page from a calendar dating to 1904 and old posters of Lincoln and Washington). It is easy to imagine this homemade toy being something that a boy would craft and enjoy, but that is not certain. Anything is possible.

In my chapter, I cite the work of one of our archaeologists,

Jane Baxter, who has completed cutting edge work on the archaeology of Comstock youth, cites a March 18, 1870 article in the Territorial Enterprise that describes a game children called “Pee Wee,” that consisted of a block of wood and a bit of string.

That sort of “toy” might not survive, or it may not be easily recognized in the archaeological record as a plaything.

The desks at the fourth ward school also include a bit of vandalism that was apparently key to creating a classroom toy of sorts, as my chapter describes:

Of particular interest are desks that have deep notches cut along the edge facing the student. Oral history collected from a visitor suggests boys used these to hold wooden rulers, which could catapult spitballs across the room. It takes oral histories to understand the significance of … a cut in a desk, … Here, the material culture bears the imprint of use and a vivid image of what it was to be a child on the Comstock emerges.

Because children don’t often leave us a written record. Teasing insights from a variety of sources is usually needed to piece together their lives and unique perspectives. This portrait of childhood is from the last part of the nineteenth century in the American mining West. Elsewhere, things may have been different – even as much that is childhood remains the same over the centuries.