Susan Olivia Poole grew up in Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

 at the White Earth Indian Reserve

White Earth Indian Reservation

The White Earth Indian Reservation is the home to the White Earth Nation, located in northwestern Minnesota. It is the largest Indian reservation in that state...

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Biography

Susan Olivia (née Davis) Poole, a.k.a. Olivia was born in 1889 and died in 1975. She was part Ojibway and a talented pianist who studied music at Brandon College in Manitoba, Canada where she met her husband, Delbert Poole, who was studying for the ministry.

As a child Olivia watched her elders strap their babies to cradle boards to carry them as ‘papoose

Papoose

A papoose is an American English loanword whose present meaning is "a Native American Indian child" or, even more generally, any child, usually used as a term of endearment, often in the context of the child's mother. The word came originally from the Narragansett tribe...

s’. While working in the fields, a mother would often hang the papoose on a sturdy tree limb and soothe the baby by occasionally pulling on the limb to cause a bouncing motion.

Olivia remembered this in 1910 when her first child, Joseph, was born in Ontario, Canada. She made him a swing and called it a Jolly Jumper. She made the harness or saddle from a cloth diaper and a blacksmith created a soft-action steel spring. An axe handle was used for the spreader bar.

In 1942 Olivia and her husband moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. When grandchildren arrived, she continued to make Jolly Jumpers as she had for all of her seven children and by 1948 Jolly Jumpers were ready for mass production.

Olivia Poole and her son, Joseph Poole patented Susan’s invention in 1957 and manufactured ‘Jolly Jumpers’ at Poole Manufacturing Co. LTD. in British Columbia, Canada.

This Canadian invention is still being produced today in Mississauga, Ontario

Mississauga, Ontario

Mississauga is a city in Southern Ontario located in the Regional Municipality of Peel, and in the western part of the Greater Toronto Area. With an estimated population of 734,000, it is Canada's sixth-most populous municipality, and has almost doubled in population in each of the last two decades...

, Canada under its original name, Jolly Jumper. There are two models available; (item #104) Jolly Jumper with door clamp and (item #108) on portable stand.

There are now over 100 items being manufactured under the Jolly Jumper trademark.