Fairy Castle

Here's one of Mom's many stories. I typed this for her today.

Doll House

When I was 9 we moved up to the Foothills and lived at 631 Caleb Street. Caleb street was a winding mountain road that started at one end of Hillcrest and ended at the other end. They built a dam that cut the far end of Caleb street off. The near end had very fancy houses where I loved to sell Girl Scout cookies. At the 2nd or 3rd house on the left there was a lady who really liked me. She was building a dollhouse. It sat out by the garage. I wasn’t that much interested in dolls but she wanted me to sit there and watch her work on the dollhouse. The thing I liked the best was right inside the front door of the house.

She had a fantastic carved wooden beautiful bar. It had all kinds of fancy carvings on it. But it had something special. It had a front and a back and had several hidden compartments. It had two or three or four hidden compartments she showed me the secret way to get into these compartments and I felt very special that she let me in on her secret.

We moved to Illinois in 1972 and at some point we took the kids to the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry. They had a beautiful dollhouse on display that I felt strangely connected to. I somehow felt nostalgic every time I saw it.

In 1979 I took my sister to the Museum of Science & Industry to show her this dollhouse that I thought had strange memories. (The Colleen Moore Fairy Castle).

Adele looked at it and said, “You fool, that’s the dollhouse that you watched Colleen Moore build. You were the only kid that she allowed on the property. All the rest of us were jealous. We wanted to see it also.”



Here I didn’t really care, but was more interested in the bar with the secret compartments. Now I understood where these nostalgic feelings about the dollhouse came from.

From Ann: Colleen Moore was a silent film star who started building the dollhouse of her dreams in 1928. Because of her influence in Hollywood more than 700 people helped her with the project, "including surgical instrument lighting specialists, Beverly Hills jewelers and Chinese jade craftsmen." (From description on official website, below). She used the dollhouse to raise money for children's charities, displaying it at department stores. She raised $650,000 between 1935 and 1939. In 1949 the director of the Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago convinced her to donate it to the museum.