Doll museum closes in Canal Winchester
The founder and longtime curator of the Mid-ohio Historical Doll & Toy Museum has shuttered the doors for good on the endeavor she began on a whim with just a few dolls more than 35 years ago.
The nonprofit in Canal Winchester typically closed for the winters; however, owner Henrietta Pfeifer announced in a Facebook post last month that it would not reopen this spring.
Instead, a good portion of her collection — made up of thousands of dolls ranging from centuries-old pieces to classic Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls to Disney “Frozen” figurines — made the trip last week to its new digs at the World’s Largest Toy Museum in Branson, Missouri. The rest of the toys — save for a few dolls from her personal stash — will be auctioned off for charity, she said.
The 82-year-old cited her health and age as reasons for the closure.
“I didn’t feel like I could put in the work like I should,” Pfeifer said.
Still, the decision to dismantle the collection she’s spent decades curating in a 6,000-square-foot facility on her family’s property was difficult.
“It’s very sad for me,” said Pfeifer, who as a farm girl growing up in rural Kansas didn’t own dolls but found a passion for them as an adult. “This has been my life for many years and had been a community service.”
Pfeifer said she didn’t realize just how big of an impact she had until the calls, emails and social media posts began pouring in after the announcement.
Jodi Hatherly lamented that she and her daughter Cailee, 9, would no longer be able peruse the rooms of characters, something the pair did often, especially when Cailee was younger. She also worried about where she’d take the dolls in her small collection to get repaired. (The museum also housed a “doll hospital” run by Pfeifer and volunteers.)
Cailee enjoyed the circus-themed room as well as dolls based on Wonder Woman and “The Wizard of Oz,” while her mother relished the opportunity to introduce her to toys from her youth.
“She could always find something that piqued her interest,” Hatherly of the Northwest Side said of the museum, which charged $3 for admission.
Pfeifer constantly updated the collection with donated pieces or interesting toys she found. Every year she created new exhibits highlighting different eras, such as Civil War dolls and figurines.
Pfeifer said she had hoped to donate her collection to an Ohio town to use as a tourist attraction, but the feelers she put out to various locations went unanswered. Then she remembered a conversation she’d had with a man who visited her museum five or six years ago.
“He told me if we ever decided that we could no longer function as a museum that I should give him a call,” Pfeifer said.
This man was Tom Beck, owner of the World’s Largest Toy Museum, home to more than 1 million toys. Beck picked up two truckloads of donated toys last week, including marionettes depicting Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” that were made and donated to the Canal Winchester museum by a central Ohioan.
“It did make a big impression on a lot of people,” Pfeifer said. “I guess it fulfilled its purpose.”