We Antique Folk Used to Love Our Own Country Auction Sales With a Colorful Cast of Old Time Auctioneers

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

      I want to begin this post by quoting a rather lengthy but poignantly written passage, from one of my favorite books on antiques and auctions. It was taken from a biographical work of the 1960's, entitled "Sold to the Lady in the Green Hat - America's First Woman Auctioneer," written by the main lady of the national auction gavel, Emma Bailey. It is a fascinating and folksy biography of a truly courageous woman, who pushed her way into the male dominated auctioneer pool, and earned quite a reputation among her peers, both in Vermont, where her auction barn was located, and in the national association of auctioneers at the time. Her story appeals to me more so, because it brings back so many memories of our Muskoka auctions from the 1970's through the 1990's, when I seldom missed attending one or more each weekend through the summer season.

     "Folks, some of your faces are familiar to me, but many of you are strangers. I am sure that most of you have attended auctions before. Here in Vermont, country auctions are an institution. And I'd like to tell you, just for a moment, how I feel about them," wrote Emma Bailey, taken from a short speech she gave before starting her very first auction, of what became a very celebrated career in auctioneering.

     "To me, a country auction is more than just a cut and dried affair. If you want something new, there are many nice things on display in the store windows on the Main Street in Brattleboro (Vermont). They are fine for young people just setting up housekeeping, and for older folks too, who want to redo their living room in Swedish blond, or some other modern design. But the pieces sold at a country auction have a character all their own. They have an intimacy not to be found in bright new things, for they have been used, enjoyed, and loved too by someone over the years.

     "Take this simple unadorned rocker. It's at least fifty years old. In all that time it has been a comfort to the family that owned it. It was honestly made of solid maple. you can see how the fine wood has been worn by the touch of resting hands. It has been a sanctuary for the young and old. Maybe a mother sat in it while gently rocking her baby to sleep. Plain as it is, just an ordinary rocking chair, it was treasured by the family who found contentment and peace in its arms.

     "The passing of time makes everything a little older. Thus the trade in antiques is a self perpetuating business which never runs out of merchandise. Auctioneering like everything else has its ups and downs. But the country auction will always draw a goodly crowd. In prosperous times people come because they have money to spend on things which have nostalgic appeal, and in periods of depression they pick up used items which they can't afford to buy in the stores. So whatever the economic weather you'll find the auctioneers welcoming flag waving in the breeze up and down the land."

     Auctions in South Muskoka, back in my gad-abouting from sale to sale, were social / cultural fetes, where dealers, collectors, and sundry other pickers, would mix with the general public of curious sightseers, not really too interested in buying. But then there was the carnival of the sale itself, and depending on the qualities of the auctioneer for that particular event, it could be the unfolding of great entertainment on an otherwise boring summer day. And believe me, some of the auctioneers, from back in my thirty years, regularly attending these sales, pretty much throughout Muskoka, were clever entertainers who could properly engage a large crowd. This is what an auctioneer wants most of all. The audience to be electrified by the ups and downs of the gavel, and the comedic stuff meshing with the dramas between top bidders, that often got into heated exchanges between the auctioneer, the bidders, back bidders, and hecklers in the audience.

     Antique dealers in those years, who I regularly communed with at these sales, were in attendance to bid on a wide variety of bits and bobs put up for auction. For those of us who had shops, or did the antique shop circuit, we all needed lots of affordable inventory. Most of the sales, with under sized attendance, gave us a chance to bring home hundreds if not thousands of what we called antique and collectable "smalls," meaning generally minor but highly salable pieces that we could price low, just above the loss-leader status, to fill out the shelves of our shops or vendor booths at shows. There are dealers who try to avoid cluttering up their enterprises with lesser collectables, preferring to keep a higher standard of inventory, to suit, possibly, their opinion of an up-scale market place. In some cases this might have been true, but I can tell you from many years of experience, that it was the success of the "smalls" that helped keep our store rent paid, and our bills caught up, when the big or marquis pieces all dealers possess as recognition, status or show stopper highlighters don't sell for the much bigger asking prices. I met very few dealers in my day who wanted to admit that "smalls" saved their butts on many occasions, when they couldn't for love nor money sell a chair, buffet, sideboard, dry sink, flat-to-the-wall cupboard, or a nice set of flow blue dining ware. If you couldn't tempt a customer to spend a couple of hundred bucks on a nice painted landscape, or a nice roll top desk you got from an estate, well, it was perfectly fine then to sell fifty dollars in nostalgia, from vintage vinyl for record lovers, bags of collectable marbles, hockey and baseball cards, magazines on everything from home decorating, to the old news of back issue Life Magazines and National Geographics. What about collectable vases, salad bowls, kitchen artifacts, wall hangings, mottos especially, bags of buttons, egg cups, crystal glasses, and odd bits of china suitable for glamming up the cupboard tops and the shelves by the fireplace that may have been a little thin.

     The point is, seeing as most of us seriously enjoyed our mornings and afternoons spent at these country auctions, run by some really neat auctioneers who put on fantastic shows for attendees, we also had to show some initiative even if we didn't have a lot of money left, after buying a few of those marquis pieces, of which every sale has a dozen or more jewels. In the swellness of friendly competition, we'd sort of try to out perform each other, by seeing who could get the most for the least, when it came to the job-lots which for the general public were nuisance intrusions on the progress of the sale. Meaning, the job-lot boxes, of which there could be several hundred or more, each being loaded with the odds and sods of a retired estate, that couldn't possibly be sold individually unless they were articles of jewelry or, say, other items like old coins and stamp books that could be broken down to smaller lots, because of their higher valuation. I loved those box lots because we sold a lot of "smalls" every day at our Bracebridge shop, and they were perfect for our customer base back then, who wanted a diverse inventory to browse through each week, that was affordable and attainable, without breaking the bank. It's not that we didn't sell big and more expensive antiques, but that it was our mission, to tap into each customer visit, so that few could leave without investing something, however tiny the amount, and leave with a small bag of found treasure. It made them happy and we were delighted to add yet another sale to the day's tally.

     Each auctioneer had a particular and often curiously achieved threshold, when it came to dealing with the "fiddly" stuff, that included these cumbersome boxes of old mismatched china cups and saucers, vases by the hundreds, beer coasters, anniversary wine glasses with decanter, and just about anything else someone might have collected, or been given many years previous; that had for the purposes of this liquidation, been tossed into boxes, to make it somewhat more efficient for the auctioneer to sell off in a short a period as possible. Ah, that was my hope, and it panned out many times in those years. Especially in the way of old books, which I would buy with vigor, because Suzanne and I have always had books in our shop from the first day of Birch Hollow Antiques. And because Suzanne likes to buy and sell old kitchen utensils, and cookery related pots, pans, bowls with a little age behind them, we never missed an opportunity to bid on these rows of stacked to overflowing boxes. But sometimes, you could misunderstand an auctioneer's impatience with an audience, and find yourself bidding on what you believe is a job-lot of four big boxes, only to find out that the auction staff had, to sweeten the deal, included a new line on the table, offering another twenty boxes for the same winning bid. In other words, the auctioneer was running out of time, there was rain showers commencing, and there was no way the sale could be halted on account of inclement weather.

     I remember at one Bracebridge sale, buying what we thought were eight pretty interesting boxes of nostalgic kitchen ware, that was enhanced by another twelve boxes pushed our way by the auction helpers, who informed us they would even carry all the stuff to our vehicle. We had no idea these other boxes had been lumped in with the others, and I had to tell Suzanne that we would have to seriously compromise our brand new van, to accommodate what was apparently a buyer's dividend. This has happened to most dealers at some point, and auctioneers and staff don't like it when you don't haul your "crap" (as they call it when they're frustrated) off the host property. I have left some things, yes. I have also grabbed up things that were unceremoniously dumped by others, from their job-lot purchases. Truthfully, however, most of us back in the day, who were operating pretty successful shops, needed those job-lot opportunities, and yes, we did haul most of the buys home, and to the shop, and it can be said with some integrity for our small business histories, that although we may not have like the visuals of it all, and the sorting and cleaning of all the thousands of items in those boxes, we did okay in the final tally, and felt pretty good when customers bought-up those really ugly florescent unicorns found in the clutter of the classic job-lot purchased.

     We loved those country auction of once, and we communed a lot, sharing stories about those great and not-so-great auction moments, when we smiled out the outside, steamed on the inside, but once everything was paid for, loaded up, and everyone back on the road again, it was the spark that got us laughing about the fun of being an antique dealer, and having the opportunity to attend these character-filled country sales, where all sales are final, and the carnival of it all is worth every penny it cost to participate.