Collector Chats With Peter S. Seibert

This Week: I Miss Antiques In New England

Now granted these shops were definitely of a certain type and look. They were filled with copper luster, brass candlesticks, painted or refinished mule chests and hooked rugs of lighthouses. They were somewhat ubiquitous, to say the least.

By Peter Seibert

So, let me begin this column by saying that I am writing the column speaking in generalities and not about specific shops. I am sure there are great malls and shops all over New England, but this column is about their overall decline in the last several decades.

I have been lucky enough to have lived and worked in many parts of the country and thus seen the antiques market from all different perspectives. This goes from the mega antiques malls in the Midwest to the southern shops that sell items picked from antique malls in Pennsylvania. New England always had a soft spot in my heart because no matter where you went from Vermont to Maine to the New Haven Colony, you could find great shops.

Over the last year, I have traveled the coast to Maine, and then this year just returned from a jaunt up the Hudson into Vermont. In both cases, to quote my friend Mr. Frost, I chose the road less traveled in my hunt for antiques. Wow, the road less traveled was vacant of single and group shops. It was painful.

In Vermont, we usually stayed closed to the Shelburne Museum (an institution where you can still go to see lots of real stuff and not the single object in a white painted room with 50 panels of labels). My antiquing would start at the three big co-ops near Middlebury and then proceed up the highway to Burlington to hit several more. If I needed more to look at, I could cross over the lake and head past Ticonderoga to see lots of little home owner-shops that dotted the landscape.

This time, in the span of a full week, I found only one shop that was open and had goods. And the shop was really a revenue front for the rock band that used most of the space as a rehearsal hall. Wow! The co-ops were gone and replaced in many cases by the equally ubiquitous farm-totable stores. For most of a certain age, farm-to-table stores are better known as roadside produce stands. But in New England, they have gone upscale and now charge $10 for a pint of strawberries. Where did the crusty old New England couple who have two rooms packed full of stuff go?

The saddest part for me was a large barn and house shop where 40 years ago I purchased my first piece of antique furniture, which was, by a modern standard, a rather mediocre country Empire table. But I had just gone to work while in high school as a tour guide at a museum that had one much better than the one at the shop. The seller had brought it from an auction and gladly sold it to me for $75. It filled the back seat of my mom’s two-door coupe all the way home and today it is my wife’s bedside table. That shop is now gone. The house and barn are there and look better than ever but the back porch with the new finds is sadly a thing of the past.

I write this lament only because as much as I hear signs of changes for the better in the antiques trade, and I really do believe there are many positive signs, the loss of place is really harsh. I do not think my kids or their friends will perhaps ever see again that lovely farmhouse shop where two rooms had the best of treasures.

“Born to collect” should be the motto of Peter Seibert’s family. Raised in Central Pennsylvania, Seibert has been collecting and writing about antiques for more than three decades. By day, he is a museum director and has worked in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Virginia and New Mexico. In addition, he advises and consults with auction houses throughout the MidAtlantic region, particularly about American furniture and decorative arts. Seibert’s writings include books on photography,Americanfraternalsocieties and paintings. He and his family are restoring a 1905 arts and crafts house filled with years’ worth of antique treasures found in shops, co-ops and at auctions.