Tribal Doll Nets Library $210,000 at Auction

A little like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, a female figure has slept in a glass case on the third floor of the for 89 years.

The woman—a wooden Native American doll from the Pacific Northwest Haida tribe—changed her address this past Wednesday and brought the library $210,000.

The library put the figure up for auction several months ago. 

The goal: to deaccession items not relevant to Woburn, according to library Board President Janet Rabbitt, and to take care of items important to the city.

A representative from Sotheby’s auction house in New York came to the library around March, Rabbit told Woburn Patch Friday afternoon, to evaluate two marble busts in the library’s collection. He walked past the glass display case, saw the doll and asked, Rabbitt said, if the auction house could send an expert out to inspect her.

Her pre-auction auction estimate:  between $50,000 and $70,000.

She is “one of four dolls and one mask known to have been carved by the ‘Jenna Cass’ carver, one of the great Haida artists of the early 19^th century,” according to the library press release about the sale.

“I was flabbergasted,” Rabbitt said, by the winning bid.

The doll came to the library, Rabbitt said, from Sarah Ann Tidd, who was born in 1829, on April 29, here.  Her grandfather, Capt. William Martain got the doll for her in the Pacific Northwest, Rabbitt said, as a gift, en route from a trading voyage to China. Tidd died in 1925, at age “95 and nine months.” The doll came to the library, Rabbitt said, in the winter of 1923. The library has the provenance, or history, on 99 percent of the items in its collection, Rabbitt said.

Some of the money from the doll’s sale—$10,000—is earmarked for the library’s Glennon Archives, for special genealogy software, according to Rabbitt, and day-to-day supplies, like archival storage boxes.

The rest will go into the library’s building fund, she said.

The library has moved up to 11^th from 12^th, according to Rabbitt, on a list for a $10 million state library grant toward a proposed $24 million library renovation and addition. The library has raised $3.1 million—not including proceeds from the sale of the doll—toward the project. Rabbitt “guesstimates” that the city will rise to the top of the grant list in between two and four years. All local funding has to be in place six months after the grant is awarded, she noted.

Several years ago, the library deaccessioned three paintings of the USS Constitution, according to Rabbitt. They now belong, she said, to the Constitution museum near the ship. That time, “We knew the Constitution Museum bought the paintings.”

But Rabbitt doesn’t know, she said, and would love to find out whether the new owner of the Haida is a museum or an individual. Some library staff watched the auction on line this past Wednesday, according to Rabbitt. She couldn’t even do that at work.

One part of the Sleeping Beauty and Snow White analogy doesn’t fit the doll. She isn’t beautiful, or even pretty. Rabbitt labeled her “homely.” If Rabbitt gave the doll to her granddaughter, the board president would be afraid, she said, that it might give the child nightmares.