Figure 1.--This is a 2" X 2 1/2" tintype portrait of an unidentified boy wearingba collar buttoning mikitary jacket with brass buttons. Notice the large white collar which looks like an Eton collar. Large collars like this were not common in America at the time. White shirts were common, but we mostly see boys wearing smaller collars. This boy wears his collar with a narrow stock done looking rather like a bow. The portrait is undated, but it was cased like a Dag or Ambro. As American tin-types only appeared in the mid-50s, this suggests that the portrait dates to the mid-1850s to the early-60s.

We note these military jackets worn with and without visible shirts. Most of the images we gave archived show the boys wearing shirts with these jackets, or at least detachable collars. The shirts are ioften almost entirely covered so we are not sure about the shirts worn with tggese jackets. There much have been shirt or shirt waists. Most boys seem to have worn these jackets with white shirts, based on the collars we can see. Usually you can only see a hint of the shirt at the collar. Of course id a detachable collar is used, that cobes up the actul shirt or shirt waist. If you look carefully you can sometimes see shirts cuffs, such as the photograph posted on the previous page. But usually all you see of the boys' shirts are a little bit of the collar. Thus we know next to nothing of the contruction of the shirts boys wore with these jackets. As far as we can tell they were mostly white shirts. We note some with more prominent show of the shirt collars. In some cases they cover the jacket collars, The tin-tyoe portrait here is a a good example. He seems to be wearing an Eton-type detachable collar (Figure 1). Notice the tips are slightly rounded unlike the pointed classic Eton style. We note both small and large shirt collars. The large collas are almost always detachable collars. We suspect that there was a chronological aspect to thee variations, but because so few Dags are dated, e hacve not yet been able to establish these trends. One hint of course are that Ambros as well s tin-types only begin in the mid-1850s and CDVs in the early-60s. Most of the large collars we have found are Dags and to a lesser exten tin-types. And as detachable collars were invented in America during the 1830s, they could have been worn in the 1840s. This may mean that the large detachable collars were more of a 50s style. We are still working on this issue.

Created: 9:27 AM 8/14/2012
Last updated: 4:50 PM 1/13/2015