George B. Leiter's Ring-A-Peg

Finally making good on a promise I made way back in November, here's a little more about Ring-A-Peg, a game manufactured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by George B. Leiter of Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

This information is gleaned from a copy of the trademark document for the game, which was registered on December 1, 1891. The document lists it as a "parlor game" and features an illustration of small pegs inside a circle. Small rings can be flipped into the circle, in an attempt to get them around the pegs, using a device that looks like the squidger in Tiddlywinks. (It's called a "snapper" on the trademark document.) So the game is basically an indoors, tabletop version of quoits.

The image on the trademark sheet indicates that a patent had been applied for. I don't know if it was ever granted.

The most detailed history of Ring-A-Peg can be found on the North American Tiddlywinks Association website by Rick Tucker (a fantastic site to lose yourself on for an hour). If you scroll down the page on the game's origins and evolution, there's a section on Leiter's game.

It states, "George B. Leiter, then of Norristown, Pennsylvania, registered a U.S. trademark for Ring-a-Peg on 23 September 1924, 33 years after the claimed first use of the mark on 13 May 1891." And I'm not going to dispute any of that information, because Tucker is the expert and I'm just a guy parachuting in for the afternoon on this topic. I highly recommend Tucker's history page, which also includes the Ring-A-Peg rules sheet.

Here's a detail from the 1891 trademark document, followed by the full document. For more on Leiter, see last November's post.