This dollhouse was hand-crafted by Captain Josiah Nickerson Knowles (1830-1896) for his small daughter Ellen “Nellie” Sears Knowles (1858-1913).
In early 1858 Captain Josiah Nickerson Knowles, husband of Ellen Sears (oldest daughter of Joseph H. Sears), survived a shipwreck in the Pacific Ocean and spent months stranded on an uninhabited island. He eventually returned to Brewster -- and a family who had mourned him as dead -- but soon faced real tragedy in the death of his twenty-four-year-old wife.
In the fall of 1859 Knowles left his twenty-month-old daughter Nellie in the care of Olivia Sears, Ellen’s nineteen-year-old sister, and set off on a series of voyages that would keep him from home for more than three years.

Nellie’s Dollhouse