Dollhouses, Miniature Kitchens and Shops: From the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center Book

Visitors have long loved the two dollhouses featured in this book. The handsome Morris-Canby-Rumford dollhouse belonged to one family from the time it was built and furnished in 1820 until it was given to the Folk Art Center in 1981. It still holds many of its original Empire-style furnishings as well as later pieces copied from eighteenth-century antique furniture owned by the family. The Long Island dollhouse is an impressive, 12-foot-long, Colonial Revival-style structure believed to have been built about a century after the Morris-Canby-Rumford dollhouse. Its rooms contain many finely crafted antique neoclassic and Victorian pieces as well as more modern furnishings and accessories given to the house by generous donors. Several toy rooms rarely seen by visitors are also included in Dollhouses, Miniature Kitchens, and Shops. Now people who missed previous exhibits can imagine laboring over the large stove top in the tile-roof kitchen, appreciate the "new style" embodied by the turn-of-the-century kitchen, and admire the fashionable hats modeled by the beautifully painted mannequins in the millinery shop.