If you enjoy a carroms or crokinole, Carson's forgotten Crolard board feels like a missing branch on the family tree. Around 1899, newspapers in Kansas and Indiana treated it like the next parlor craze, and its maker, Ed F. Carson, like a man headed for a fortune.
Today, the game is gone and forgotten. When I followed the surviving ads and records, I found a product that burned bright for a few years, then slipped through the cracks of game history.
The story starts with Carson himself.
Ed F. Carson caught the right moment
Edgar F. Carson was born in 1871, and by the 1880s his family had settled in Pleasanton, Kansas. His father, Wilson Carson, worked as a farmer and furniture maker, so Ed grew up around wood, tools, and practical handiwork.
As a teen, he spent time in furniture work, then took a clerk job at a second-hand store called Household Fair. Soon after, he bought the shop from his employer and later went into business for himself.
Somewhere along the way, Carson teamed up with a craftsman named N. W. Barnett. Barnett had a tabletop dexterity game in mind, something like mini billiards with its own twist. They refined it together, but Barnett died before they could take it to market. Carson took over the project,
By the late 1800s, North America already had a taste for flicking and pocketing games related to carrom, which had roots in India and spread widely. At the same time, combination boards were booming. Publishers packed chess, checkers, dice, dominoes, and other amusements into one box for family evenings at home.
In 1899, Carson moved to South Bend, Indiana, where he could grow the business. Pleasanton's papers sent him off with real hometown pride, and one prediction was pure booster gold:
"In a few years, the game of Crolard will be as common as checkers, and Ed F. Carson will be a millionaire."
What the Crolard board actually looked like
A 1902 ad gives the best picture. The board was a shallow wooden box, 28 inches square, with blocked corners, green felt, and an octagonal central area ringed by a cushion border. It had eight numbered pockets where balls could drop, plus brass scoring devices at the corners. Sadly, the surviving images don't show enough detail to explain exactly how those brass counters worked.
A reconstructed view of the kind of board Carson advertised.
The box reportedly included:
- nine polished wooden balls
- 29 rings, apparently much like Carrom rings
- mallets, arches, tenpins, and checkers
- a rulebook covering Crolard, Rolo, Knockout, Parlor Croquet, tenpins, ninepins, cocked hat, cushion pin, pocket cannon, checkers, and chess
That mix says a lot about what Carson was selling: rainy-night recreation for the front room. The top model, called the Number One board, cost $3.75 and had a checkerboard on the reverse side.
The rules are hard to reconstruct. The drawings suggest a marble-style pocket game with rebounds, targets, and scoring by numbered holes. In other words, it looked like a cousin to a carroms or crokinole game board, but with extra features. For a broader look at how these families of games connect, the history of pichenotte and crokinole helps place Carson's board in that wider tradition.
For a few years, the business looked huge
Pleasanton papers said Carson started with about $500, advertised in eastern and northern newspapers, and saw demand spread "like wildfire." One report claimed he soon had more than $10,000 in capital stock, about 7,000 boards on hand, and sales in every state and territory.
The same coverage said he had secured a patent, obtained Canadian protection, and applied for patents in France and England. He even planned an exhibit at the Paris Exposition. By 1901, the South Bend city directory listed him as a toy and game manufacturer, and South Bend and the Men Who Have Made It praised his wholesale and mail-order trade.
His own letters home embodies his optimism. In May 1901, he told a friend back in Pleasanton that the business was "flying sky-high," with three traveling salesmen covering the country from Boston to San Francisco. In 1902, he incorporated the Carson Toy Company with his sister Mary and her husband, James S. Stevens. Then in 1906 he placed an investor ad in Everybody's Magazine, complete with a grand image of the modern factory he wanted to build.
After that, the trail cools fast.
Crolard's fate is harder to trace than its rise
An auction listing gives one clue about what survived. The board shown there doesn't match the early ads very well. Instead, it looks a lot like a Carrom Archarena-style board with felt on the back. The listing said one side handled carroms, checkers, and chess, while the other side was for parlor croquet, tenpins, and related games. That sounds like a later, more generic version of Carson's idea, not the original design from the height of the craze.
Carson himself also drifted out of focus. The 1910 census places him in Manhattan, working in the mail-order business. A 1915 voter registration record, also in Manhattan, lists him as a salesman for E. A. Stetson, a firm that remains hard to identify. By 1930, he appears in the census as an inmate at the Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital in Orange County, New York, at age 58. I haven't found an obituary or death notice that fills in the rest.
One final wrinkle matters if you search this history. Carson's company is easy to confuse with South Bend Toy Manufacturing Company, founded in 1888 by Frederick H. Bedette and John W. Teel. They had made croquet sets and toys for years, and some records blend the two businesses together. They were separate companies. Ii's probable that South Bend Toy manufactured the Crolard boards for Carson, or even absorbed the line later. I can't prove that, and the evidence stops short of certainty.
South Bend Toy outlasted Carson's board by decades. Playskool bought it in 1960, Milton Bradley acquired both Playskool and South Bend Toy in 1968, and the South Bend plant later produced licensed Star Trek electronic toys in 1979. Milton Bradley closed the company in 1985, and toy making in South Bend finally stopped.
Gone and forgotten
It’s not such a rare thing, really. Products with great promise do fade away. But I find it interesting how close this game came to becoming a household name. For a brief stretch, Carson had the right product, the right sales pitch, and the right moment in American parlor-game culture.
“Fare thee well, Ed.”