But let us give a brief description of the Toy Industry, which chiefly serves to differentiate the village from all others in Southern Tyrol.
St. Ulrich's wares are ultimately sent all over the world, and whether in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, or Rome one is almost sure to find amongst the toys, carved figures of saints, crucifixes, artists' "lay figures," chalets, and other articles some examples of work from this famous valley of wood carvers. The fact that nearly 3000, or about three out of every five, of the inhabitants are engaged more or less directly in the work will give some idea of its magnitude.
The carving industry at St. Ulrich is supposed to date from about the commencement of the seventeenth century, and there are some figures of the Virgin and Saints still extant in churches of the district bearing dates of that period, and other images of apparently much earlier date, which show that even in those remote times the carvers of St. Ulrich and the Grödener Thal possessed considerable skill and reputation. It was, however, one Johann von Metz who at the commencement of the eighteenth century appears to not only have raised the standard of the work of carving to greater perfection, but also to have organized and extended the sphere of the trade itself.
In the years which immediately followed, the peasants were in the habit of themselves setting out into other lands with stocks of their work for sale; and some at least, according to tradition, found their way to England, and even across the Atlantic, where they abandoned the active work of carving for that of establishing trading depôts in connection with St. Ulrich, and thus they distributed the work done in the far-off and almost then unknown Grödener Thal throughout the commercial world.
Nowadays to sally forth with their stock-in-trade on their backs or in a cart is no longer the practice of the workers. The greater number are employed by firms which act as wholesale distributing agencies for them, to whom they take their weekly output of work. Most of the villages of the valley are employed in the carving industry; St. Christina, for example, making a speciality of "lay figures" and hobby horses.
Not only are most of the men of the villages in the Grödener Thal thus employed, but also many of the women and children. And it is no uncommon sight to see quite mites cutting away at blocks of the softer kinds of wood by the roadside or on the doorsteps of the cottages; and sometimes one meets the women on their way down from the woods or upper pastures with their barrel-like receptacles upon their backs, roughly shaping some article which will be finished off when they get home.
"TOY LAND"
Some of the carving done is really good, but it cannot be said to be cheap. One cannot find bargains in St. Ulrich, or, for the matter of that, in any of the villages of "Toy Land." The demand is too great, and the means of distribution too well organized for the peasants to care in the least whether one purchases a "bit" or not. There are practically no shops where carving is sold by the workers themselves, as nearly all are employed under contract or otherwise by wholesale dealers. But the tourist can generally visit one or other of the large ateliers, where, in particular, the carving of images and more elaborate articles is done under the superintendence of artists. It is an experience and a sight well worth spending an hour or two over. In that time, by watching several figures at various stages approaching completion, one can obtain a very good and clear idea of the different transformations which the rough-hewn block undergoes ere it assumes its final shape of a Virgin, St. Joseph, St. Antony, or St. Christopher. Many of these statues and smaller figures are sent to a different workshop for painting and gilding; and it is chiefly in the white chalets on the mountain side that the toys and smaller articles are made.
The goods are stored principally in the larger houses of the villages. One of the chief depôts bears the name of the man who developed the industry, whilst other well-known merchants are Insam, Purger, and Prinoth. In these warehouses one sees shelf upon shelf laden with toys, figures, dolls, and other carved work; miniature waggons, monkeys on sticks, hobby horses painted in gay and let us add entirely "unnatural" colours, with flaming red, jet black, or piebald manes. The toys are of all prices, just as they are of many sizes and qualities as regards "finish;" hobby horses costing from half-a-krone to several florins each; dolls ranging in price from a halfpenny and even less to five or six kronen. Figures intended to form the contents of Noah's arks are there by the bushel, the cheaper kind bearing, it must be admitted, but faint and partial resemblance to the animals they are intended to represent; the better kinds being excellent miniatures of lions, elephants, tigers, giraffes, bears (especially good these), and the hundred and one smaller animals and insects of the patriarch's great family party; and accompanying all the delightful smell of freshly cut pine and other woods in the warehouses given over to unpainted things, and the somewhat overpowering smell of new paint in the others.
Some of the dolls, more especially those which have Tyrolese costumes represented in wood, need great care in carving; and others are swiftly done, some by elementary machinery. The best wood used is the pinus cembra, or Swiss pine, which originally grew thickly on the sides of the mountains, but has now largely to be imported owing to the fact that whilst the trees have been cut down by the thousand, scant provision appears to have been made for the future by planting others. There is, however, plenty of the wood still left in the immediate neighbourhood.