Category Archives: Antiques

Research and related queries.

Dec
17
2024

Wadsworth Mayhew’s Signature Fishtail

by Gary Sanderson

Antique collecting can trigger the wildest, most unpredictable and fulfilling adventures – some hot and fruitful, others cold and barren. When an enticing, dangling thread of inquiry gets tugged and just keeps on giving, the eager anticipation of important discovery can be truly exhilarating. Case in point: a pair of 18th-century banister-back chairs I recently […]

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Dec
28
2023

George Washington Mark Treasure Surfaces

by Gary Sanderson

Greenfield tradesman and folk artist George Washington Mark was well-known about town and in surrounding communities as an eccentric house, sign, furniture, carriage, and sleigh painter, not to mention a flamboyant downtown character, between 1817 and 1879, when he died in his 84th year. Born in 1795 in Charlestown, New Hampshire, Mark was said to […]

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Nov
16
2023

Colonial Diary Offers Clues About Scandinavian Cupboard

by Gary Sanderson

On my plate today is a recent weekend trip to a friend’s Lake George summer home, her interesting carved, painted 1789 Scandinavian cupboard that stirred my inquisitive juices, and the fascinating, unrelated mid-18th-century journal of a scholarly foreign traveler whose North American observations and commentary unexpectedly helped pull everything into focus. First, the astute foreign […]

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May
12
2020

Leather-Working Mecca

by Gary Sanderson

An old cliché tells us familiarity breeds contempt. So, how about ignorance? Does not familiarity breed that, too? Well, in my case, the answer is an unapologetic yes. Let me explain, focusing on boyhood South Deerfield. At the southwest corner of Pleasant and North Main, a short distance up the road from my earliest home […]

posted in Antiques, Columns, Genealogy, South Deerfield | Comments (2)

Apr
10
2013

Clockwork

by Gary Sanderson

It’s Wednesday morning, column day, and nothing seems to be going right, even choosing a topic difficult. One of those days, I suppose. Always dangerous. Never know where a man might wander on a warm spring day. As for my unexpected issues, well, I imagine you all know the drill. First you go out fiddlehead […]

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Jul
09
2009

Chapman/Pierson highboy

by Gary Sanderson

Discovery is exciting, precisely what keeps people hunting through moldy cellars, dusty attics and decaying barns, yard sales and crack-of-dawn flea markets. Collecting’s a disease, one that can be highly contagious, a fever that grips you … which reminds me of a recent visit to my Greenfield, Ma., home, one that bore sweet, salubrious fruit, […]

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Jun
19
2009

Sanderson chest

by Gary Sanderson

I’ve been poking around lately in the western Franklin County hill towns of Conway and Ashfield, walking old roads, investigating cellar holes, town histories, old maps, genealogies, deeds, probate records, talking to landowners … trying to connect the dots. It’s never easy, this world of discovery, but always rewarding, even invigorating. Great fun. Cheap entertainment. […]

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