About the Loring-Dresel Family 

Ellis Gray Loring (1803-1858) and his wife Louisa (1797-1868) had one child, a daughter named Anna (1830-1896).  In 1863, Anna Loring married Otto Dresel (1826-1890), a German pianist and composer.  The Dresels had two children, Louisa Loring Dresel (1864-1958) and Ellis Loring Dresel (1865-1925), neither of whom married.  The paper dollhouse might therefore be the creation of Anna or one or both of her children, or perhaps a collaboration of all three.

Beginning in 1872, after three years in Germany, the Dresel family lived on Charles Street in Boston, at the foot of Beacon Hill, and spent summers in Beverly Farms on the North Shore.  Their home life was enriched by books and music, and also by friends and acquaintances from the intellectual and artistic circles of late 19th century Boston.  In an unpublished memoir Louisa Dresel wrote later in life for her godsons, she tells the story of her visit with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when she was twelve, and remembers the evening Nathanial Hawthorne was a guest at the house next door.  Louisa also wrote and illustrated stories and poetry, and during several summers in Beverly Farms, she and her brother Ellis created their own newspaper, "The Union."  Ellis wrote "serious articles—geographical or historical," and Louisa supplied the fictional stories, poems, and local news. 

It is evident from Louisa Dresel’s papers that she had an interest in drawing and painting from a young age.  In her memoir she writes: "As a child I had a considerable talent for drawing and a great love for it."  In a letter to her close friend, Maine author Sarah Orne Jewett, Louisa notes that she took lessons in watercolor at age eleven or twelve.  In 1878 the Dresels returned to Germany and lived and travelled throughout Europe for several years.  During this time Louisa kept diaries and wrote many letters, often including small drawings of her observations.  Some of her watercolor paintings were later part of a show of her work at a Boston gallery.  Throughout her life Louisa kept scrapbooks of postcards, newspaper clippings, and many of her own photographs.  There are several diaries and scrapbooks of both Anna and Louisa Dresel in the Ellis Gray Loring Family Papers, 1824-1925, at the Schlesinger Library.

Ellis Gray Loring Family Papers, 1824-1925. A-115. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Papers of Ellis Gray, 1809-1949. A-160. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Richard Cary, "Jewett to Dresel: 33 Letters." Colby Library Quarterly, Series 11, No.1 (March 1975), pp.13-49. http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2175&context=cq

Loring Genealogy, Pope and Loring; Cambridge, 1917.