A Difference of Opinion About Antiques, Collecting Them, the Haunted Places They Are Found and the "Writer Witness"

A Birch Hollow photo by Suzanne Currie

     I have purposely avoided close relationships with colleague antique dealers. As far as being able to build some friendships within the industry, without any burdens of philosophy to weigh the relationships down, I can admit to having worked closely with dozens of dealers since the mid 1970's when I got my start in the profession, and in a few cases I found worthy tutors in this merry band of mostly regional antique hunters. It's not that I'm particularly hard to get along with, although some, including my family members, would disagree, but rather that even as a career writer, I don't share much in the way of intimacy, such that I would feel comfortable talking philosophy and ethics. I most often gravitate toward those professionals, in antique and writing, who I know possess something particularly inspiring; stories about the respective industries that I want to know about, because I probably haven't enjoyed the opportunities myself. I don't talk about individual antique items, big finds, big scores, or tall tales about my most interesting past finds, adventures or experiences here, there or anywhere. Same with writing. I don't commune with my contemporaries, but I will always yield to those with lengthy tenure in these professions, because they always help me clear obstacles and inspire adventures that I hadn't dared commit to previously. I just don't find either profession worthy of causal conversation. In fact, the most words expended over the decades, touting my opinions on collecting and authoring, have come via the thousands of feature articles and columns I've written in a wide variety of publications. I prefer having a readership than a physical audience I suppose. I'm not much of a public speaker, and I really can't handle conversations that veer to far from my areas of expertise. In conversation my attention span never exceeds fifteen minutes. Suzanne, my editor, just started to laugh, because she knows darn well, that if I have a captive audience, I will only shut-up when everyone departs the room to move on with the few hours left in the day. It's my hallmark. Bore those close to me, and then go and write something.

     One of the most significant barriers I have in the antique business in particular, that keeps me from making any attempt to go beyond gracious small talk, versus full involvement in heritage discussions and on matters of professional ethics, of which I am particularly keen, is that I began my professional antique career within days of getting my first writing gig for the local press here in Muskoka. I had just opened up Old Mill Antiques on Manitoba Street, in Bracebridge, when I was asked to write a weekly column about antiques for the newly launched Bracebridge Examiner. It was a rather short-lived column but what it initiated was a side-bar enterprise of doing business related features for other publications, including the summer newspaper, The Muskoka Sun. When I signed on to Muskoka Publications as a staff writer, I was quick to volunteer to handle any business features that were needed for area auctioneers, antique shops, antique markets, flea markets, second hand shops, or special coverage of estate sales and significant heritage auctions throughout our coverage area. I was even deployed to write features on local museums and their fundraising events. I had an inside scoop on Bracebridge's Woodchester Villa and Museum, as a founding member of the first executive of the local Historical Society.

     The fact that I had merged two careers into one in those early years, was complimented by the fact I was already immersed as a rookie historian, who eagerly accepted any opportunity to head back into the retired farm pastures to explore the many abandoned homesteads dotting the hinterland. In fact, one of the first and most successful early forays into the pioneer era of Muskoka, came with the publication of my "Homestead Chronicle" series, which was all about me roaming around these forgotten and dilapidated places, that had in reality, opened up the entire region on the sweat equity of poorly equipped and miserably financed emigrants largely from the cities of Europe. They were hardly prepared for the hardships they encountered in this wild area of the 1860's onward. The enticement of free land grant to ambition homesteaders, as offered by Dominion Government agencies, overseas, pulled a lot of unsuitable pioneers across the ocean, to find better lives than they had in their home countries. Many didn't stay in Muskoka, finding the farmland unsuitably rocky with a thin soil, leaving their half completed farmsteads for better opportunities elsewhere. There is a lot of sadness in the retelling of those early settlement years, and wandering through some of the pioneer cemeteries in South Muskoka, you come upon the human imprint of this hard life, with great privation and so much personal loss. I learned a lot about the period that presented so many heritage articles, from furniture to implements, axes, saws, pike poles, and the inadequate iron stoves that never quite heated the porous log cabins and shanties as the home dwellers would have benefitted. Being out there, and sitting for hours on a knob of hillside, overlooking the grown over former shelters, gave the voyeur, me, a pretty decent insight about the way we were; and if those times seem romantic and nostalgic, they should also be starkly haunting as a human chronicle of hardship and survival against tremendous odds. We don't think about this period often today, as so much progress and urban development has raked over the same lands that once were the poor farms of barely subsisting homesteaders. The issue of history doesn't come up often with developers looking to turn open space into large city-style subdivisions. Doesn't mean the social / cultural history of Muskoka can be turned under by a bulldozer blade, but it does make historians wonder whether they have been trying to preserve something that the future finds cumbersome and an obstruction to getting on with life and times in the modern context of good living.

     In the antique profession, my insights came from interviewing many antique dealers and those curators involved in the historical preservation at local museums and heritage sites across the district. I got my education largely from going off the record with these folks, who gave me the kind of inside scoops that revealed aspects of the conservation, buying and selling game, that I could only have found out after many years in the profession. We talked about the darker side of the antique business, and the kind of unethical stuff that was going on in the trade, by certain dealers of questionable morals, and how to stay clear of some of the potential frauds that were playing out almost daily amongst so called professionals. I was invited into the inner sanctums of veteran dealers and collectors, who weren't adverse to spilling the beans, so to speak, about some of the scandalous goings on in general, about how some important antiquities were being bought and sold, and how fakes were getting passed about, even being offered to museums as originals, and frankly, it scared me into a lengthy period of concern about the profession I had so happily joined as a keen twenty year old. Now let me make it clear. The insights offered to me were never to be revealed, and were not part of my feature stories. But none the less, they were offered to me by those who had been, in a minor way, involved in questionable deals and purchases in the past. Some admitted being duped into buying frauds by unscrupulous pickers, and others were telling me that they had been, in some cases, partners in shady deals they should have known about, but seemingly felt they couldn't get out of easily, or without the residue of criminal activity sticking to them forever. It was for my information only, and much of this was validated over the years in my own business activities, when I came face to face with thieves trying to sell off stolen antiques, especially art. I have always felt advantaged from these former interviews with well known antique dealers, and auctioneers, who put me in the position of "the informed," ruling out any serious potential I was going to be a part of a scamming network. It still exists out there, and experience is a dealers / and buyer's best defence.

     There has never been a meaningful separation for me, between writing and buying and selling antiques, in true historical vein of the profession. I am always looking for potential story lines when I'm out an about hunting for evasive antique pieces and art work. And I will soon relate some of those terrific finds made, that provided a great collection of related pieces, and inspired a significant investment in story writing as a result of a truly great find. The story of Canadian Artist, Katherine Day of Oro-Medonte comes first to mind. What a great story attached to an amazing cardboard box of archive materials, found at a local antique collective.

     As for my retreats back to Muskoka homesteads? Best investment of time a budding writer, historian and antique dealer could have had, to spark the union that has carried on from the 1970's to the present.

Thanks so much for visiting this site today, sponsored by Birch Hollow Antiques.