Nostalgia, craftsmanship live in 98-year-old dollhouse

Jill Jackson remembers it perfectly: She was 16 on a winter's day long ago in Lombard, Ill.

"It was dark, and it was snowing. I was driving home slowly when some light caught my eye. A window was lined with tiny Christmas lights. And there, glowing in the middle of the window, there was this dollhouse. It was in the window of Violetta's Antique Store. I fell in love."

The dollhouse itself had been a labor of love: Violetta told Jackson that a Chicago craftsman used walnut and brass nails to make the dollhouse for his daughter in 1910. It is a one-foot-to-one-inch scale model of their real house. It has two bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, bathroom, a back porch off the kitchen and front porch off the living room. It weighs 100 pounds, empty.

Its walnut doors work, each with a brass doorknob. Lace curtains hang in the windows, and the house number - 710 - is visible on the copper placard above the mailbox on the front porch.

Jackson had to have it. But $600 was a lot of money in the 1970s to spend on an impulse purchase.

No matter. Jackson drove the three blocks home and demanded, "Mom, if I needed $600, what would you do?" Jackson instantly realized that her ashen-faced mother, Elaine, had misinterpreted the question.

After Jackson explained herself more specifically, and "When the color came back to her face," Jackson recalled, "she said - greatly relieved - 'Honey, we'll get you this dollhouse.' "

Elaine Jackson knew what a handmade dollhouse meant to a girl. In 1926, her father made one for her. But it wasn't a gift. Jackson's first job was working in Hickory Farms store for $1.85 an hour to pay back her parents.

When Jackson moved to Oregon from Chicago in 1978, the dollhouse came, too.

In the 1980s, she displayed the dollhouse in her Corvallis antique store, Jack and Jill's Junk. Grown women would stop to examine the rooms, which reflect the kitchen appliance and furniture styles of the '30s through the '50s.

"It looks like every grandmother's house," Jackson said.

Jackson approached several public places with offers to lend it out as a holiday display, but none of those ventures worked out.

It was Jackson's friend and business associate Janis Larson, who said yes. Larson owns Furniture Restoration Center of Oregon, and the theme of her Christmas display is "Home for the Holidays." Just as Violetta did in her Illinois antique shop, Larson placed Jackson's house on display in her store window at 1321 Main St. in Philomath. It will remain there through January.

"We are trying to get the word out so people will come and enjoy it," Larson wrote in an e-mail to the newspaper.

Jackson said the dollhouse's effect on her hasn't changed. "We've been together now for more than 30 years."

The Story Next Door

Who: Jill Jackson, 51

What: Owner, J.K. Jackson Upholstery

Where: Alsea

Family: Mother, Elaine Jackson, 83; six siblings and partner Bruce Malone

Interests: Furniture restoration, upholstery and collectibles - especially her 98-year-old handmade dollhouse. It's on display through January at Furniture Restoration Center of Oregon, 321 Main St. in Philomath.