Grand Opening of Doll House Museum in McConnelsville
Sat, Apr 01, 2006. 10:07 PM
By: Atish Baidya Email Story
Watch Video Walking into the Doll House Museum is like walking to a room with a thousand eyes watching your every move. The one room museum is packed dolls from all around the world. "We have dolls that actually little girls played with to beautiful collectors dolls that sat on a shelf and was not played with," Morgan County Historical Society Trustee Brian McKee said. "We have china dolls, rag dolls, all sorts of antique dolls as well as lots of Madame Alexander dolls."
The museum is housed in a building donated to the Morgan County Historical Society by Mrs. Evelyn True Button, the great-grand daughter of General Robert McConnell, the founder of McConnelsville.
The historical society's collection started with a donation of 1000 dolls and grew from there.
The Doll House Museum has some 2,500 dolls on display including some unique ones including a set made in 1934 to commemorate the birth of the Dionee quintuplets. Also in the collection is a doll dating back to 1867. It was given to a little girl from Malta, Ohio as a Christmas gift.
"It's a china doll with leather arms and leather legs," McKee said. "It has a trunk of clothes that were handmade by her mother."
The museum houses modern dolls as well, like Harry Potter and vintage Barbie dolls.
For visitors it all adds up to a trip down memory lane.
"There are a couple of dolls here that I had as a child," Annie Warmke said. "My mom was a big doll person and it was the 1950's. One was a bride doll that is in one of the cases here. I got that doll when I was really small and when I saw the doll it almost made me cry."
The dolls not only speak to childhood memories but to our values as well.
"I think they represent culturally who we are," Warmke said. "Who we are as a nation and who we are as a people even as a family."
So the dolls aren't really watching us as they are letting us take a look at our collective past, right before our eyes.
