The Atlantic City Quakers

Lizzie Magie made the rules. The Atlantic City Quakers made the board.

If you have ever played Monopoly — Boardwalk, Park Place, Marvin Gardens, the four railroads, the small green houses and the small red hotels — you have been playing a hand-drawn folk version of the Landlord’s Game made by a small community of Quakers in Atlantic City in the winter of 1929. Almost none of the names on the board you played on come from Lizzie Magie. They come from people whose names appear in no patent and on no box: Ruth Hoskins, Eugene and Jesse Raiford, Cyril and Ruth Harvey, the Layman family in Indianapolis from whom Hoskins first learned the game, the Thun brothers in Reading, Pennsylvania.

This is the second part of our history of Lizzie Magie’s Landlord’s Game. The first part covered Lizzie herself — her politics, her patent, the long lawsuit that eventually surfaced the truth. This one is about the thirty years between the patent and the lawsuit, when the game survived only because real people, in particular houses, in particular cities, kept it warm.

Why Atlantic City

To understand why a board game ended up encoded with the geography of one specific New Jersey resort town, you have to understand what Atlantic City was in the late 1920s. It was, then, the most famous holiday destination in the United States. The Boardwalk, by 1929, ran for over four miles along the beach. Half a million people visited in the summer high season. The hotels — the Marlborough-Blenheim, the Traymore, the Chalfonte, the Haddon Hall — were institutions. Boardwalk and Park Place were where the people from Philadelphia and New York came to spend money.

Three blocks inland, the city was poorer. By the time you reached Baltic Avenue and Mediterranean Avenue — both real streets, both still there — you were in working-class neighbourhoods, in the parts of the city the holidaymakers did not see. The city’s racial geography was rigid: the Northside, where most of the Black residents lived and worked the resort jobs, was effectively segregated from the Boardwalk economy that depended on its labour.

Atlantic City was, in 1929, an almost perfect natural experiment in the politics of land value. A vacant lot in the Boardwalk district was worth, by some accounts, fifty times the equivalent lot three blocks inland. The difference was not the soil. The difference was the community around it. This is precisely the argument Henry George had been making for fifty years. It is the argument Lizzie Magie’s game was designed to teach. And so when a copy of that game arrived in the city, in the hands of a Quaker schoolteacher, the names on the board changed almost immediately.

The Friends School

In 1929 the Atlantic City Friends School — a small Quaker school for primary and secondary students, founded a few years earlier — recruited a new teacher named Ruth Hoskins. Hoskins had grown up among Quakers in Indianapolis. She had studied at Earlham College. She moved east to take the job in Atlantic City, and she brought with her a hand-painted copy of the Landlord’s Game.

She had learned it back in Indianapolis. There was, by the late 1920s, a small but enthusiastic community of Landlord’s Game players in Indianapolis — Quakers and Georgists who had bought their boards directly from Lizzie Magie’s small print runs in the early 1920s, or had encountered the 1906 commercial edition published by the Economic Game Company. Hoskins had been one of those players. She brought the game with her to Atlantic City the way one brings a recipe — not as a possession, but as a thing to be shared.

She taught it first to her colleagues at the Friends School and to a handful of friends at the Atlantic City Friends Meeting. Among them were Cyril Harvey, who was either a teacher or a school administrator depending on which account you read, and his wife Ruth Harvey. There were the Raiford brothers — Eugene Raiford and Jesse Raiford, both Atlantic City Quakers, both connected to the resort hotels. There were the Joneses, the Coppages, others whose names have not survived. They began, that winter, to play the game.

They began, almost immediately, to change it.

The redrawing of the board

The first change was the names. Lizzie’s 1924 board carried generic property names — “Easy Street,” “Lonely Lane,” “Beggarman’s Court” — names chosen for their pedagogical resonance, names a Georgist could nod at. The Atlantic City group did not nod at them. They drew a new board with the names of the streets they walked to work. It was not a deliberate political statement. It was the cartography of their daily lives.

Mediterranean Avenue and Baltic Avenue were the cheapest properties on the new board because they were the cheapest streets in the actual city. Boardwalk and Park Place were the most expensive on the board because they were the most expensive in the actual city. The four railroads — Reading, Pennsylvania, B.&O., Short Line — were the four lines that brought passengers into Atlantic City in 1929. The two utilities — Electric Company, Water Works — were the actual local utilities. The Income Tax square charged $200 because, in the early 1930s, a $200 tax bill was approximately what a working family in Atlantic City might owe.

Even the names that have since become absurd were grounded. Marvin Gardens — perhaps the most famous misspelling in American board game history — was a corruption of Marven Gardens, a real residential development in Margate City, just south of Atlantic City. The name itself was a portmanteau of Margate and Ventnor, the two municipalities the development straddled. Whoever did the lettering on the first hand-drawn board misspelled it. The misspelling was preserved in every subsequent copy. Hasbro briefly corrected it in 1995 and received so much complaint mail that they reverted within weeks.

The Raiford brothers and the houses

The second change was structural, and it was the single most important rule modification anyone made between Lizzie’s 1904 patent and Charles Darrow’s 1935 patent. It came from Eugene Raiford, possibly with the help of his brother Jesse, in the same winter of 1929–1930.

In Lizzie’s original game, players who owned a property collected rent at a fixed rate. If you owned a complete colour group — a “monopoly,” in the game’s deliberately pointed terminology — your rent rate doubled. That was the only escalation mechanic. There was no construction. There were no houses. The game’s only physical pieces were tokens to mark each player’s position.

Raiford added wooden blocks. Small ones for houses. Larger ones for hotels. He proposed a rule: a player who owned a complete colour group could develop it by purchasing houses, which dramatically increased the rent. Once you had four houses on a property, you could trade them in for a hotel, which increased the rent again.

The change accomplished three things at once. It gave the game a clear arc — properties were no longer static, they grew. It compressed the endgame — once one player started building, the others were quickly bankrupted. And, most importantly, it gave the game theatre. Watching the green houses go up on Boardwalk, watching them get traded in for the single red hotel — there is a tactile satisfaction in that small moment that the original Magie game did not have. The wooden blocks made the game feel alive on the table.

Without the Raiford brothers’ houses and hotels, there is no Monopoly. The game Charles Darrow eventually copied was already, by the time he encountered it, two innovations beyond Lizzie’s patent: the Atlantic City names, and the development mechanic. Both of these were Atlantic City Quaker contributions. Both of these were uncredited until the Anspach lawsuit forty years later.

The other branches

The Atlantic City version was not the only folk Landlord’s Game in circulation in 1930. It was just the one that won.

In Indianapolis, the community Ruth Hoskins had left behind continued to play. The Layman family — Daniel Layman in particular, then a student at Williams College — had encountered the game both at home in Indianapolis and at college through a separate lineage. At Williams, two brothers from Reading, Pennsylvania, named Louis and Frederick Thun, had brought their own copy of the Landlord’s Game to campus. The Thuns played it. Layman played it with the Thuns. Layman took the rules home to Indianapolis and continued playing there.

In 1932, working with a small Indianapolis company called Electronic Laboratories, Daniel Layman published his own version of the game under the name Finance. He had, he later said, simplified the rules for manufacturing — the same impulse Eugene Raiford had acted on with the houses, but pulled in a different direction. Finance sold modestly. In 1933 Layman sold the rights to Knapp Electric for two hundred dollars. Knapp Electric, in turn, sold Finance to Parker Brothers in 1935 for ten thousand dollars, after the Darrow version of the game had begun selling and Parker Brothers had decided to buy up every variant they could find.

In Reading, the Thun brothers continued to play their version with their own circle. There were players in Philadelphia, players around Wharton, players in the Quaker meeting in Germantown. None of these branches looked exactly alike. None of them used identical property names. None of them, except Atlantic City, had houses.

By 1932, what existed in the United States was not a game called the Landlord’s Game. What existed was a family of games, descended from a common ancestor, mutated by hand each time they were copied, played in private homes by people who knew the game by word of mouth and a typed sheet of rules from a friend.

Charles Todd and Esther Jones

The bridge between Atlantic City and Charles Darrow was not a board. It was a friendship.

Esther Jones, who would later marry Charles Darrow and become Esther Darrow, had a childhood friend named Olive Todd. Olive had married a man named Charles Todd, who managed hotels in Philadelphia. The Todds had family and social connections to the Atlantic City Quaker community — through Olive’s relatives, through summer holidays, through the Friends Meeting circuit. They had learned the Landlord’s Game in its Atlantic City form. Charles Todd kept a hand-drawn copy at home. He had typed up the rules.

In late 1932, the Todds invited the Darrows over for dinner at their house in Germantown, Pennsylvania. After dinner, Charles Todd brought out his copy of the game and taught it to the Darrows. Esther was, by all accounts, the more enthusiastic player of the two. Charles Darrow asked Todd to send him a typed copy of the rules. A few days later Todd did. Darrow took those rules home along with a hand-drawn copy of the Atlantic City board, and he began making his own copies on circular pieces of oilcloth — adopting wholesale the Boardwalk, the Park Place, the Marven misspelling, all of it.

This is the moment everything pivots. Five separate folk versions of the Landlord’s Game were in circulation in 1932. One of them happened to belong to a man named Charles Todd, who happened to be married to a friend of Esther Jones, who happened to have married a man named Charles Darrow, who happened to have lost his job in the Depression and was looking for ways to make money. If any link in that chain had been different — if Esther had married someone else, if the Darrows had encountered the Indianapolis version through a different friend, if Charles Todd had grown up in Reading instead of Atlantic City — we would today be playing a game with completely different street names, completely different mechanics, completely different aesthetics.

The board you know is, in this very specific sense, a snapshot of one particular dinner in Germantown, in late 1932, between two couples who happened to know each other.

[IMAGE PLACEHOLDER — Charles Darrow’s earliest known oilcloth board, drawn from the Todd version, c. 1933, now held by the Strong National Museum of Play. The museum has not released the image under a free license; final-edition reproductions will require permissions.]

What was preserved, what was lost

In 1935, when Parker Brothers signed Darrow and began publishing Monopoly, they spent the rest of the year quietly buying up every other variant of the Landlord’s Game they could find. They paid Daniel Layman’s Finance ten thousand dollars (via Knapp Electric). They paid Lizzie Magie’s 1924 patent five hundred dollars and a vague promise of distribution. They paid Charles Todd nothing, because Charles Todd had nothing to sell — he had only ever played the game, never patented it, never published it. They paid the Atlantic City Quakers nothing, because the Atlantic City Quakers had never claimed ownership of anything.

The Atlantic City names “won.” The Atlantic City development mechanic — houses and hotels — “won.” Lizzie’s Single Tax ruleset was dropped. Layman’s Finance banking variations were dropped. The Thun brothers’ Reading variations were dropped. Everything that had been Atlantic City was kept, because Atlantic City was what Charles Darrow had copied. Everything else became a footnote in the eventual lawsuit.

By 1936, the version Parker Brothers shipped in the Monopoly box was, structurally, the Atlantic City version. The corner squares from Lizzie’s 1904 patent. The track. The Chance and Community Chest cards. The four railroads. The Atlantic City property names, including the misspelling of Marven Gardens. The Raiford brothers’ houses and hotels. The mechanics had drifted in small ways through Darrow’s hands and the Parker Brothers art department, but the bones were Atlantic City’s. The skin was, depending on how you counted, Lizzie’s or the Atlantic City Quakers’ or both.

None of these contributors were credited. The story Parker Brothers printed inside the box named only Charles Darrow.

Why this matters

There is a particular kind of erasure that happens to inventions made by communities. A patent has a single name on it. A box has a single inventor printed inside. The world is structured to credit individuals, and so when something is made by a hand-to-hand network — by a teacher and a hotelier and a school administrator and the Raiford brothers and a friend-of-a-friend in Germantown — there is no good place on the legal record for that fact. The lone inventor wins. The community gets remembered, if at all, by historians fifty years later, after a lawsuit.

The Atlantic City Quakers did not set out to invent a billion-dollar product. They set out to play the game on a Friday night with a board they had drawn that afternoon. They named the squares after their own city because that was the city outside their window. They added wooden houses because the wooden houses made the game more fun on the kitchen table. They taught the game to friends because it was a game worth teaching. None of them got royalties. None of them ended up on the box. Most of them died before Mary Pilon’s book, in 2015, made their names a matter of public record.

When we publish our recreation of the Landlord’s Game, the credits will list them. Lizzie Magie first, of course. But also Ruth Hoskins, who carried the game east. Cyril and Ruth Harvey. Eugene and Jesse Raiford, who built the houses. Daniel Layman and the Thun brothers, who kept the parallel branches alive. Charles and Olive Todd, whose dinner table in Germantown turned out to be the only thing that mattered. We will name them on the title screen and in the booklet.

It is a small gesture against a hundred years of silence. We do not pretend it is more.

The next entry in the Diary covers the lawsuit itself: how Ralph Anspach, an economics professor with no relevant qualifications, spent ten years in court against General Mills, and how a deposition from an eighty-year-old Charles Todd in 1976 finally put the Atlantic City Quakers’ contribution on the legal record forty-six years after the fact.

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Sources & further reading

Primary sources

• Anti-Monopoly, Inc. v. General Mills Fun Group, Inc., 611 F.2d 296 (9th Cir. 1979). The trial record from Ralph Anspach’s lawsuit contains depositions from Charles Todd, Daniel Layman, and other surviving folk-version players. The fullest legal record of the game’s prior art.
• Daniel W. Layman, The Fascinating Game of Finance (Electronic Laboratories, Indianapolis, 1932). The 1932 published derivative of the Landlord’s Game, later sold to Parker Brothers via Knapp Electric.
• US Patent No. 1,509,312 — Elizabeth Magie Phillips, Game-Board (1924). The version Hoskins, Layman, and the Thuns all played, before the Atlantic City modifications.

Books

• Mary Pilon, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game (Bloomsbury, 2015). Chapters 5–8 are the most thorough modern reconstruction of the Atlantic City and Indianapolis chapters of the story. Hoskins, the Raifords, the Todds, and Layman are all profiled.
• Ralph Anspach, The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle (Anti-Monopoly, Inc., 1998). First-hand account of the lawsuit that established the Atlantic City contribution as a matter of legal record.
• Philip E. Orbanes, Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game and How It Got That Way (Da Capo Press, 2006). The Parker Brothers side of the story; less critical of Darrow than Pilon, but the archival access is rigorous.

Articles

• Mary Pilon, “Monopoly’s Inventor: The Progressive Who Didn’t Pass ‘Go,’” The New York Times, 13 February 2015.
• Christopher Ketcham, “Monopoly Is Theft,” Harper’s Magazine, 19 October 2012.
• “Monopoly: The Hoosier Connection,” Indianapolis Weekly View, 25 July 2013. On Daniel Layman and the Indianapolis branch.

Archives & online resources

• landlordsgame.info — Thomas Forsyth’s archival site. Particularly useful for this period: the Folk Period and Atlantic City Quakers sections include photographs of surviving hand-drawn boards from 1929–1935.
• The Strong National Museum of Play — holds Charles Darrow’s earliest oilcloth boards, several Atlantic City Quaker-era boards, and an extensive Layman / Knapp Electric Finance archive.
• Wikipedia: Finance (game) — well-sourced summary of Daniel Layman’s parallel branch.
• Wikipedia: History of Monopoly — broader overview with citations into the academic literature.

A note on names

Where this piece names individuals — Ruth Hoskins, Eugene Raiford, Charles Todd, Esther Jones — we have followed the spellings and identifications established in Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists and in the Anspach trial record. The Quaker community of Atlantic City was small but its membership shifted year to year, and several of the names cited here are reconstructed from depositions taken decades after the fact. Where a fact is contested between sources we have followed Pilon, whose archival reconstruction is the most thoroughly documented currently in print.

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Part one of this series, on Lizzie Magie herself, is here. Part three — on the lawsuit, the court, and the eighty-year-old Charles Todd’s 1976 deposition — is in progress.