On Becoming an Intimate Player in Someone Else's Life - as a Dutiful Antique Dealer and Collector

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

 A few years back, on a late winter gad-about, we were browsing through a regional antique mall, as was typical fare as a family outing, on our one day off a week, (we never open the shop on Sundays), and in one of the vendor stalls, I found a plain, no frills whatsoever, cardboard box wedged under a wood table. As a career scrounger and someone who makes many stellar finds in the most unlikely places and, yes, boxes, I couldn't resist pawing through the odd collection of ephemera that had been wedged into the cardboard container. In a few minutes, and with a really sore back from being hunched over the collection of handwritten notes and art sketches, I realized it was a biographical treasure trove of a regional artist who obviously had passed away and left these for the executors to either donate to a museum, destroy as being irrelevant to anybody, or offered for sale at either an estate clear-out or auction sale. This information wasn't as important as the immediate rescue operation. I was not going to allow this significant material, including some fascinating art sketches of children, and architecture, to wind up in someone else's possession, who would cull the folios for framable art and get rid of everything else.

     I paid the hundred plus dollars for the small but amazing personal collection, and at the precise moment the transaction was completed, our family became immersed in art and writing legacy of Canadian artist, Katherine Day of Oro-Medonte. I did wind up composing a hefty biographical manuscript based on the contents of that box, and following completion the originals were donated to an Orillia gallery collection that already possessed a goodly number of Day's art work and written material. The finished manuscript was published on our business Facebook Page, given to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery Archives and a video released as well, highlighting her art work and the beautiful place in Oro-Medonte where she had two enchanted little cottages built in the late 1940's and early 1950's. The point I wanted to emphasize here, is that for a full year, Suzanne and I lived and breathed the Katherine Day story through her handwritten journals and her sketch books, and of course having researched all the biographical information we could find in local histories and on-line. Her father had been a well known school inspector who had even worked here in Muskoka, visiting public schools as an overseer to make sure teachers and administrators were doing their duties for the benefit of students. The Day family was prominent in Orillia and Katherine, for many years, was a well known personality visiting the restaurants and shops, and Church, in the city's downtown core. We got so deeply involved in her biography, that we began visiting her gravesite in Orillia and bringing some tiny interesting rocks from our home here at Birch Hollow, to adorn the top of her granite family tombstone. We felt spiritually connected to Katherine, and still do, because we came to know and appreciate so much personal, intimate information. So much so, that through a journal she kept for her perpetually tight budget, we knew exactly what she would eat for dinner at a main street department store that also had a lunch counter. We knew what she was buying for groceries and pet food because she entered those expenses in this accounting book. We also learned from the same booklet, what medication she required for a serious stomach disorder, that we believe eventually contributed to her death. We could see the drastic changes in her handwriting as her ailment became more serious, until the time when she was forced to seek hospital care. She died a short time after being admitted.

     We also stumbled onto the reality, she had formerly, in her training years as an artist, in Europe, prior to the Second World War, had a significant relationship with an artist-mentor, who was well known on the international art scene at the time. He was connected to many of the finest artists and writers of the pre-Second World period, and it was a relationship that included at least one major shared art show in New York, that received mixed reviews for her tutor, and poor reviews for her work. Her love interest in her artist teacher never fully matured, before the rumblings of war sent both into exile; as the instructor was sought by the Nazis for reasons undetermined. Katherine immediate withdrew from Europe, and specifically Paris, and returned home to Canada, where she set up home and studio near her original family home in Orillia. It was where she would spend the balance of her life, never marrying, or having a family to share her unique little cottages in that Oro-Medonte region that, at the same time, in the late 1940's, Kenneth Wells and his wife Lucille, had established their "back to nature" homestead, known popularly at "The Owl's Pen," only a short distance from where Katherine was doing pretty much the same pioneering-thing just a little closer to the city limits of Orillia.

     Prior to this, Suzanne and I had taken on a massive estate collection of "old paper," for a Gravenhurst women, Miss Mary Reid, the daughter of Reverend Ewing Reid and his wife Maud, formerly of the Alhambra Church, in Toronto, and a cottager on Lake Muskoka's Browning Island. When Suzanne and I, and our assistants, sons Andrew and Robert, set eyes on the huge volume of paper heritage, and biographical journals and correspondence well back into the 1800's, we were panic stricken to start with, and that mode of operation didn't really end until the estate was fully resolved, and the executors satisfied with the results. For three months the work was so intensive, that we couldn't really do much else in terms of business operation. The majority of the material was sold in online auctions, because we had a serious time limit to clear everything up, to coincide with the house sale before the start of the summer season that year. We read through many hundreds of letters and studied thousands of photo images, as all the Reid family loved taking pictures, plus what Miss Reid's family had inherited themselves, in terms of family photo albums, specifically from Merton and Bronte Ontario. On top of this, there were hundreds of letters to Reverend Reid and his wife, from her brother who was a missionary in China in the early part of the 1900's. We found a buyer for this part of the collection very easily online, and honestly, there were very few pieces of the entire collection left at the end of our three month adventure. But it did take a toll on us, and even today, we are still as intimate with the Reid family as we were then. As I've written about many times before, Suzanne and I sleep each night on what family called "the death bed." Which is a beautiful 1850's circa spindle bed that was once used in the church manse, where the Reids lived in Toronto, that was used to display the recently deceased, when family could not afford an undertakers full service. The deceased was placed on the bed with appropriate attire and adornments, including floral displays, and family and friends were invited into the manse and the subject room, for purposes of a viewing and possibly a small and intimate ceremony before the funeral procession was to begin. And you know what, it's true, we do sleep like the dead.

     We have experienced this intimacy many times in the past, and as it is part of the antique profession we have chosen in which to specialize, we except the good with the bad. But we do become imbedded in the materials we acquire in this regard, and I think you can probably appreciate the kind of detailed information we are exposed to, that might make some folks a little unsettled. We get lots of those moments but the real prize is working in a field of the antique profession, that best suits our interests as historians. We also enjoy the right of ownership, that does allow us considerable freedom to develop this hand written record into heritage features we like to publish. We do of course practice due diligence, in what we do publish, and fully appreciate the sensitivities of what we have access to as personal confessionals, and what we must protect for the sake of still surviving family.

     In my next post, I'd like to explain the treasure trove that exists with old books, that goes well beyond the value of the printed and bound text; revealing to the intrepid old paper hunter, many interesting and often valuable finds within.