When I was a little girl growing up in Maryland, my mother and sisters and I used to day trip to a tiny historic street in Ellicott City to see the unique boutique shops lining Main Street. We would walk down one side of the street to the bottom of the hill, and then back up the other side. I would always get really excited to see this one particular store. It was a 3-storey house with a staircase at each end, and the entire place was a giant dollhouse that sold dollhouse miniatures. I had never seen anything like it before. You would walk through each room and it had all the furniture in the room life-size and then in a bunch of little miniatures all over the room! I was fascinated! I never bought anything and usually had to sneak off by myself to wander through quickly, but I was always enamoured to walk through a giant dollhouse and go up one staircase, wander through all the rooms on that floor to the staircase on the other end, up those stairs, and back across all the rooms on the next floor over to the staircase at the other end. As a tiny girl, I really felt like a doll wandering through a life-size, wooden dollhouse! Since I was just a child with no money and no dollhouse at home, I never even knew the name of the store. But I could never visit Ellicott City without walking through my dollhouse.

So, when I got the chance to go to Maryland again 25 years later as an adult with my mother and sisters, we knew we had to spend a day in Ellicott City and once again, I could already feel the whimsical excitement bubbling inside to see my giant dollhouse before we even landed. What’s funny is I told them how excited I was to see my dollhouse again, none of them even remembered it at all! I didn’t know the name of the shop, and I didn’t see anything online in terms of a dollhouse shop on Main Street. And honestly, I didn’t think it would still be there, so I wasn’t surprised not to find it online. We arrived and parked, bumbled down one side of the street and started making our way back up the hill. I always photograph doors in cities and historic areas. So, when I saw a painting of a woman in period clothing on a door back in a brick hallway, I stopped to photograph it. In that moment, I thought of the dollhouse and the nostalgia started rising. I backed up to circle around the bend in the sidewalk to see what this door was for. Lo and behold, Jackie’s Dollhouses and Miniatures! It was still there! But it was Sunday and it was closed. My heart broke! I finally made it up there after all these years and it was closed and the inside looked like it may finally be closed for good. But I was so happy to see that such a unique little shop had survived all this time. If ever you can shop local and avoid ordering online or buying from corporations and chain stores, shop local! I guess this means I’ll just have to go back again someday. Luckily, I know someone who lives right around the corner! Cheers, everyone!

There is a video online of a visitor walking through if you’d like to see. This is so different from how I remember it. A bad flood swept through Main Street years back and I’m sure renovations needed to be made, so it looks like most of the wood was removed and the overall dollhouse feel has been replaced with actual dollhouses and displays. But the memory remains.