Mary Elizabeth Stanfield has missed seeing a lot of familiar faces as she looks around her living room these days. Two-thirds of her more than 100 dolls are across town at Wilmington College’s Meriam R. Hare Quaker Heritage Center. They are featured with other dolls from around the world in the exhibit “Bridges of Friendship: How Children Learn About Other Cultures.”

“The house seems a little empty right now,” Stanfield said. “But the exhibit is wonderful. You sometimes feel silly for collecting all this stuff, but it really has a use.” The exhibit illustrates how, through dolls, books, music and festivals, children can learn about the world.

When Stanfield, a 1944 WC graduate, tells the story of her Quaker missionary parents giving her several dolls from Jamaica as a child, one infers her love of dolls caught fire while she was a youth in the 1920s and ’30s. Rather, it was decades later when she contracted the collecting bug. In the mid-1980s, Stanfield learned about the 1927 “Friendship Doll” project when, as tensions were high between the United States and Japan as a result of immigration issues, Americans sent 12,763 dolls to Japan as a gesture of goodwill. Many of the dolls were placed in Japanese schools where children learned about their American counterparts half a world away.

The advent of World War II fomented a cruel fate for many of the Friendship Dolls, as anything associated with Americans was tainted in the mind the country’s militaristic leadership. “During the war, they killed most of the dolls, but not all of them were destroyed,” she said. “In the 1970s, they began appearing in antique shops and even in schools.” Stanfield said that, years later, the Wilmington Yearly Meeting office received a letter from a Japanese teacher who was interested in peace studies and, specifically, the Friendship Dolls. Indeed, one of the dolls, Mary, was the subject of a children’s book from which his students learned English.

A doll known as Ellen C. had resurfaced in a kindergarten class at his school on Hirado Island, which is near Nagasaki. The teacher, who noticed a Wilmington tag of origin on Ellen C., inquired of the Yearly Meeting as to what they knew about the doll. “The Yearly Meeting asked if anyone remembered anything about the Friendship Doll program in Clinton County — that was nearly 60 years ago at the time and no one did,” she added. So Stanfield and Muriel Hiatt, former dean of women and trustee at Wilmington College, ventured to find out. “I went to the Wilmington News Journal’s microfilm and there it was — we found the whole story,” she said.

Ellen C. was named and dressed by the Friends Junior Sunday School class and sent to Japan among some 58 dolls from Clinton County. Ohio was the state that sent the most with 2,283 of the American Friendship Dolls. Ellen C.’s namesake was Ellen C. Wright, a member of the College’s first graduation class in 1875 and a beloved teacher at WC for more than 40 years through the early 1920s. Their research prompted Stanfield to write a book about the rediscovery of Ellen C. several decades after World War II. The United Society of Friends Women International published her book, Ellen C., The Friendly Doll, in 1986. Ellen C.’s return to Wilmington for several months in 2010 is the centerpiece of the Bridges of Friendship exhibit. And it was Stanfield’s book about Ellen C. that sparked her interest in doll collecting. “I started with the Jamaican dolls when I was a child, but after the Ellen business and the book, I started seriously collecting them,” she said. “I got dolls from anyplace I could get them, antique stores, when my friends go on trips. I found a wonderful one in a small town in France. “They’re all very intriguing,” Stanfield said. “I have some wonderful dolls from Kenya and I’ve got quite a few Japanese and Southeast Asian dolls. My sister lived in Hawaii for a number of years and they gave me dolls from Java and the Philippines. “Recently a friend brought me two very nice dolls from Ghana and his family gave me a gorgeous doll from Russia. People find things like dolls in their attics and they don’t know what to do with them. “The collection is ongoing and growing,” she said. “I don’t know what I’ll (ultimately) do with them — all 100-plus — but, for now, I’ll enjoy them.”

The Bridges of Friendship exhibit runs through Oct. 1 with special events and programs each month. It is open weekdays, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and by special appointment.