Mary Soper’s dollhouse is several stories tall and complete with furniture, a miniature family and even a butter churn.
Displayed in a room of her Orland home, it’s surrounded by materials to furnish others like it: tiny swatches of carpet and wallpaper, finely carved furniture sets that fit in the palm of a hand, half-inch coffee mugs, and little plastic families to live in them.
Soper, 92, has supplied miniature enthusiasts, dollhouse owners and tourists from around the world at Acadia Highway Doll House Treasures since 2001, when she took over the business from a friend. A lingering injury has now forced her to close. She hopes to sell the rest of her inventory by Christmas.
Though she deals in dolls, she said meeting so many real people from all over the world at the shop has been the highlight of the last 24 years.
“I was pretty reluctant, but I finally gave in,” Soper said of getting into the business. “Which was a good thing, because all through the years, I have met some fantastic people, from tots to the elderly. The people that came in here, they have been great.”
The business is housed in a converted workshop room of the home on Route 1 where her late husband was born and where she moved in when they married in 1950.
It’s a small spot, she said, so she had to choose a little bit of everything for her customers. Soper herself wasn’t too interested in dollhouses as a child in Ellsworth, other than turning shoeboxes into small rooms, but has found plenty to enjoy about it as an adult.
In 2001, she knew of five other dollhouse stores between the Bangor area, Mount Desert Island and Belfast. Interest in the hobby seemed to wane for a while, but picked up sharply during the pandemic as families looked for projects to do together, Soper said.
Now, her shop is the first one travelers from Canada pass on their way into Maine, which has brought in even more international visitors as well as people who stop on the road to or from Acadia. That’s an added bonus for someone who likes to travel like herself.
“I certainly have enjoyed the time,” she said. “…When you meet someone from someplace else, and start talking, it’s a whole different education.”
Customers have included people fixing up old family dollhouses for grandchildren, others building new ones and, sometimes, tourists looking for portable souvenirs — such as a man from England who bought a tiny lobster and a blueberry pie to take home.
Other popular choices are tiny flowers to arrange into bouquets, or small pets; visitors are encouraged to make two laps around the store, and will find on the third that they can absorb all of the options and start making choices.
Some of Soper’s favorite shoppers have been young girls whose parents give them a set amount of money to choose something for their dollhouse. When they have to narrow down their choices for what they can afford, she teaches them an early budgeting lesson and tells them to think about where their parents would start with their real house: the kitchen, the bedroom and the bathroom.
“It’s been fun,” she said in her shop last week. “Real fun.”