For most of us, the American Revolution arrives in the imagination as a set of big, familiar portraits: a silversmith on a borrowed horse, a crossing of the Delaware, a quill scratching across the Declaration of Independence. But this summer and fall, in the sunlit atrium of the Natrona County Library in downtown Casper, Wyoming, that same story arrives from an altogether different angle, and at an altogether different scale. There, on shelves lined with hand-built dioramas, a cast of more than forty costumed dolls refights the war for independence, one careful stitch at a time, in an exhibition called Small Figures, Big Narratives.
The show opened on July 1, 2026, and runs through September 30, timed to the semiquincentennial, America's 250th birthday. It is a joint project of the Fort Caspar Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Natrona County Library, and the Casper Doll Collectors Club, with financial help in the form of an America250! Celebration Grant from the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution. But its true origin story begins, like so many good ideas, with a casual remark at a meeting.
The driving force behind the exhibit is Kathy Dilgarde, historian of the Fort Caspar Chapter of the DAR. As members discussed how to mark the milestone year, they kept circling around the same thought: the Revolution's textbook heroes are well known, but so many of the people who actually made independence happen have been forgotten. Dilgarde had an idea. "I said, 'Wouldn't that be fun to do with dolls?'" she recalled. It turned out to be a very good instinct. She collects Barbies and builds artwork with them, and she had friends in the Casper Doll Collectors Club who shared her skills. Together, they would dress a small army in period clothing and let the dolls tell the forgotten stories.
The result is seven distinct scenes built from roughly two and a half months of research, curation, and costume making. Each figure stands inside a carefully curated tableau, with Anne Holman, the DAR's Wyoming state historian, doing the research and writing the historical narratives that accompany every display. The costuming alone was a feat of miniature precision. A women's outfit took about two hours each, while the men's outfits required about four hours. "Working with doll-sized clothing is much more difficult than human clothing," Holman explained, and that difficulty was spread across a wide network of helpers, including library staff, members of the Fort Caspar DAR chapter, the Casper Doll Collectors Club, ART321 and the Casper Artist's Guild, the volunteer arts group Together We Art, and a circle of friends and community members.
The exhibit is deliberately built on the contrast between the famous and the forgotten. Everyone knows about Paul Revere's midnight ride, so Revere is there, along with other celebrated moments of the fight for freedom. But the show's real heart is with the people history has left out, and its most emblematic figure is a teenager named Sybil Ludington, who rode through the night to warn of the British, made it home without being captured, and joined her father's militia. Holman loves to pose the question to visitors: everybody knows Paul Revere, but did you know about Sybil Ludington? "She made it home; she did not get captured by the British, and she was able to join her father's militia," Holman said. Alongside soldiers portrayed in battle, the exhibit highlights the women whose roles in securing independence were every bit as important, and far too often overlooked.
"The stories we've all learned about the Revolutionary War are just the tip of the iceberg," Dilgarde said. "The people who wrote and encouraged independence were instrumental in getting it done."
For Holman, the personal stakes of the project are especially high. She remembers the nation's bicentennial in 1976 and how huge it felt in her community, and she wanted the 250th to matter just as much to the people alive to experience it. "These anniversaries for our country are very important," she said. She also wanted to make a point about Wyoming's place in the story. The state did not exist during the Revolution; there were no battles fought here and no graves of soldiers who died for independence on Wyoming soil. But that does not mean the West is disconnected from the founding. "We didn't have battles here. We don't have graves of people who fought, but their descendants are here," Holman said, pointing out that descendants of Revolutionary patriots live in New Mexico, Minnesota, Washington state, and beyond, not just back East. "We want people to feel like even though Wyoming was not a state back then, we are still a part of it."
For Holman, the choice of the Barbie doll as the medium was no accident, either. Barbie, she noted, has always functioned as a kind of predictor of what women can achieve, a figure through which generations of girls imagined futures for themselves. "We all know Barbie," she said. "It's just an accessible way of teaching." That accessibility extends to how visitors can take part. The library has paired the exhibit with a patriotic coloring page that turns the display into a scavenger hunt, and visitors who complete it are entered for a chance to win a special "250" pin, with winners drawn on August 31.
The exhibit is, in a sense, a community project writ large, the product of an unlikely coalition of historical societies, doll collectors, artists, and librarians who pooled their particular passions in service of a shared story. And it is part of a wider wave of America 250 observances in Casper: the Casper Senior Center has hosted a separate display built by the Casper Doll Collectors Club. But there is something quietly subversive about staging the grandest of American anniversaries at the smallest possible scale, with dolls in hand-stitched coats standing in for the founders. In the library's atrium, the birth of a nation is measured not in battles won or documents signed, but in the persistence of a teenage girl on a horse, and in every other figure whose name never made it into the textbook. The big narratives, it turns out, can begin with very small figures indeed. The exhibit remains on view in the Natrona County Library atrium through the end of September, free and open to anyone who wants to meet a few forgotten Americans face to face.