Along with my treasured Marx Fort Apache
and Mineral City western playsets, I had
two marvelous accessory pieces that
complemented all the cowboys and
Indians that filled my imagination and
my time. Although I didn’t know it then,
these were the western stagecoach and
the Conestoga covered wagon produced
by the U.S. Metal TOY MFG Company of
149-57-33rd St. in Brooklyn, New York
(see Figure 1).
They advertised themselves as
Manufacturers of Lithographed Metal
(Tin) Goods. They even had a commercial
New York showroom at 200 Fifth Ave
(room 205). Very little is known about the
company and numerous searches have
not turned up much, despite their prolific
production over 30 years. The New York
Historical Society says they existed from
the mid-1930s into the 1960s, and it is in
this last phase of their existence that we
find some uncharacteristic but delightful
tin-litho vehicles, totally geared for the toy
soldier enthusiast.
U.S. Metal Toy was known for producing
cheap tin-litho noise-makers, Halloween-themed
toys, spinning tops, rattles, clickers, sand buckets with shovels and party favors (Figure 2). This was their primary production, but it became evident
in the 1950s that plastic was quickly overtaking metal as the material of choice in the toy industry. They began incorporating plastic accessories into their line, like a plastic shovel to go with a tin bucket, but their expertise was tin lithography so these items were outsourced.
Around 1960, they began trying some different tin toys. One of these was a set of three different buildings (Figure 3); a church, a train station and a dude ranch. These were probably geared toward the expanding toy train market, but they also had a coin slot in their roof so they could be used as a bank. All three used the same basic structure but with different lithography.
But here is where it gets fun. The other area they tried out was making horse drawn vehicles to go with toy soldiers.
of cheap rattles and noisemakers by U.S. Metal Toy.
buildings.
These included a marvelous tin Roman Chariot (Figure 4), a Circus Wagon (Figure 5) with a variety of
animals lithographed on the sides and a lithographed driver. There was also a western Covered Wagon which was actually lithographed in 4 different permutations (Figure 6), all similar but with a different logo draped on the side of the tin canvas top. These included the “Chisholm Trail,” the “California Trail,” the “Santa Fe Trail,” and the “Forty Niners.” Finally, in a tour-deforce of lithography, they produced a perfectly wonderful yellow stagecoach (Figure 7), covered with lithographed cowboys defending the coach with rifles and pistols against some unseen attackers. It is so complex, in all
the excitement of playing as a child, I would just get lost looking at all the lithographed actors in this life play and imagine stories of the wild west unfolding along the stage route. Both the stagecoach and the circus wagon sometimes came with a coin slot in the top so it could also serve as a bank, though there was no way to retrieve coins once deposited.
The quality of the lithography on these later items was far superior to the cartoonish images used in their early production. Each of these vehicles was drawn by 2 or 4 horses which look like the classic Beaton plastics horse but made of soft plastic rather than the typical Beaton hard plastic. That is
because Beaton had already sold out to Rel Plastics in 1958 (because they could not compete with the Japanese producing identical figures to their own for a fraction of the cost).
versions of the Conestoga covered wagon.
U.S. Metal apparently started producing these vehicles between 1959 and 1961 and outsourced their plastic wagon wheels, horses and trails to Rel. Rel probably found the soft plastic either cheaper, maybe less likely to break or more pliable when plugging the hard plastic trail into the sides of the soft plastic horses. Regardless, each of their wagons was a tin-lithographed vehicle pulled by 2 or 4 plastic horses. No figures were made to go with these wagons, though Rel could have supplied them.
An unusual permutation of the horse can be seen with the Roman chariot, in that the Beaton horses have been flattened into 2-dimmensionsional hard plastic, as has the Roman charioteer. Our example of the Circus wagon also has these odd two-dimensional “flat” horses, though I would guess this might have been a later permutation and you can find each vehicle with either the standard Rel/Beaton full horse or the two-dimensional flat horse teams. They both used the same hard plastic trail that plugged into a small tin flange off the front of the wagon with protrusions that plugged into the horse flank. There may have been more than these 4 vehicles produced, but I have never seen them.
Apparently, the “writing was on the wall” for a company totally committed to tinlitho toys, as U.S. Metal toys did not last beyond the 1960s. These wagons were probably part of a diversification effort
that came too-little, too-late to keep them afloat. However, the fine lithography and the scale (about 1:35) makes these under-appreciated toys perfect additions to the tin lithography of the buildings and figures of classic Marx playsets; especially the western towns, Fort Apache or even the Alamo. It certainly worked for me as a child, as the stage coach in particular was always one of my favorite toys.
Bibliography:
Bob Hornung, Beaton Plastics: a guide for collectors Self-published buy the author in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1987.
New York Historical Society. www.nyhistory.org. 2023.