Dollhouse returns to old haunts

Monroe library gives historic toy to original home at McDaniel-Tichenor House

The Monroe-Walton County Library’s board donated the historic dollhouse which once belonged to the great-granddaughter of Georgia Gov. Henry McDaniel back to the McDaniel-Tichenor House, returning the elaborate miniature home to its original location.  Stephen Milligan | The Walton Tribune

To look into the dollhouse of Gipsy McDaniel Warfield Glaefke is to look into another world.

It’s an entire miniature landscape in there: bedroom, nursery, bathroom, dining room and den and more, fully furnished with hundreds of individual pieces, from a an entire set of china plates and tea service to a Christmas tree complete with hand-wrapped presents under the boughs.

There’s a turkey ready to serve next to the kitchen table. A parasol lies idly on a hope chest at the foot of a bed, a full globe off to the other side of the room.

There’s even a dollhouse inside the dollhouse, another step down into an ever-shrinking world of marvelous detail.

Gipsy, the great-granddaughter of Georgia Gov. Henry McDaniel, collected pieces for her dollhouse for years, traveling abroad frequently and returning with yet another element to add to the home.

The towels are monogrammed. The rugs are handwoven. It’s a tiny marvel.

And now, after 40-plus years, it’s coming home to the McDaniel-Tichenor House.

“It’s an important piece of this family,” Angela Yarman, member of the House board, said. “It’s really super fascinating.”

The dollhouse actually resided for years in the cottage next to the House, where Gipsy lived, but in 1983 the Tichenor family found a new home for the piece.

Emily McDaniel, who continued to reside in the home for years, donated the dollhouse to the Monroe-Walton County Library, where generations of children could marvel at the tiny home in a glass case right inside the front entrance of the library.

But renovations to the library and changes to how patrons use the library left increasingly less space for the dollhouse to use in the new floor plan, so the library board contacted the McDaniel-Tichenor House.

The House, now a historic space preserving the home as it once stood for tours and community events, had a space ready to take the glass case which houses the dollhouse.

And so began the process of bringing the dollhouse home.

It was a long, laborious process. The library board members had to disassemble the dollhouse into separate components and carefully store and account for each of the hundreds of tiny, individual pieces that make up the extensive decor of the dollhouse.

Then, after bringing everything over to the McDaniel-Tichenor House, they had to reverse the process and put it all back together, placing everything back where it had previously been to look as Gipsy meant it to.

But after painstaking work, the dollhouse is up and on display in the guest room on the first floor of the McDaniel-Tichenor House.

“We’re very excited the dollhouse has come home,” Stacy Brown, executive director of the Azalea Regional Library System, said.

Visitors to the House, on tours and other scheduled events there, will be able to view the dollhouse behind its glass walls.

Yarman said it’s wonderful to have the dollhouse back again.

“We’re so grateful to the library for their years of careful stewardship of the dollhouse,” Yarman said.