On doll houses and toy stores

Insight on the News, Dec 23, 1996 by Bonnie Vanaman

Surprisingly, the majority of visitors to the doll museum are adults -- some looking to add to their collections, others hoping to rekindle a little childlike wonder.

Everyone loves the Smithsonian Institution. Other museums in Washington find themselves fading into its shadow, waiting patiently for the trickle of visitors to discover their unique collections of American culture.

One such museum is tucked away in the northwest corner of the city, a quaint house with a modest sign announcing its intentions. Inside, a lone clerk graciously dispenses tickets and, for a small fee, visitors can pass through the portal and into the past -- into the Washington Dolls' House and Toy Museum, bursting at the seams with a cornucopia of antique toys and miniature furnishings.

The museum was founded in 1975 by Flora Gil Jacobs when the hundreds of thousands of items she had collected over the years threatened to overwhelm her home. Even so, not all of her collection can be displayed; seasonal exhibits, of which Christmas is a favorite, allow the curators to empty the attic several times a year.

Dolls' houses, says Jacobs, provide scholars and amateurs alike an opportunity to study the architecture, decorative arts and social history. "A very nice American woman who had lived in Mexico wrote me about a wonderful house she had seen in Pueblo and sent me some snapshots," she tells Insight. "There used to be houses that were teaching toys in the Catholic schools in Mexico and we theorize it was from one of those schools, which they did away with in the 1920s."

About 5 feet tall, the Mexican house contains indoor and outdoor staircases, a fully furnished drawing room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, bath and music room with a sleeping cat curled up on the piano. There's a chapel (complete with priest), an aviary, a working elevator and a garage housing a vintage automobile.

Most of the other dolls' houses in the collection, although smaller, are equally endowed with miniature miscellanea, from painted ceramic tea sets to perfectly stitched lace doilies. But artisans of the past didn't limit themselves to houses. The museum features other types of rare miniature buildings including a late 18th-century Zurich toy shop featured in Jacobs' children's book, The Toy Shop Mystery. The shop is stuffed with tiny dolls, tops, bowling pins, drums, a checkerboard, mandolin, hobby horse and more.

At a time when parents and grandparents buy their kids dozens of toys each year, in a climate where Christmas carols mingle with children crying "I want it!" at the crowded Toys `R' Us, it's hard to imagine an era when lucky children might receive but one toy -- a lovingly carved wooden horse, perhaps, or a set of wooden figures made by Philadelphia toymaker Albert Schoenhut depicting "Teddy Roosevelt on Safari" with elephants, giraffes, hippos and tigers.

Indeed, Jacobs' 50 years of collecting is a legacy to an all-but-forgotten craft and a monument to an all-but-forgotten time when toys were handed down from generation to generation, not tossed unceremoniously into a landfill. And Jacobs wisely provides the means for visitors to perpetuate the craft of dolls'-house construction: The museum includes a shop containing a supply of miniature furniture, accessories and dolls, said to be one of the most complete in the United States, and another with building and wiring supplies.