Do I need a water trough or a millstone?
I do not.
Do I have room for a water trough or a millstone?
Not at all, but it looked fascinating anyway.
So I drove west to the town of Peach Bottom in Fulton Township, passing lots of Amish farms and some great roadside-market signs: "Free Turnips," "Eyeglass Frames and Garlic" and "Guinea Pigs and BBQ Pork Roasts."
The merchandise at the preview didn't disappoint. Garden designers were eyeing the picturesque old water troughs, the antique cast iron and stone urns, the garden statuary, and the lengths of decorative cast iron fencing. One guy was striding along the display of millstones, pausing for a split second to measure the diameter of each and then barking the dimensions into his cellphone. There were big slabs of stone that had been used as steps and curbing in nearby Port Deposit, Maryland.
I checked out the prices the day after the auction and one of the big-ticket items was an ornate urn with three herons at its base that, according to the label, might have come from a DuPont estate. It sold for $3,800.
My question was this: How were the people going to get their purchases home? These were not pieces you could pick up, wrap in an army blanket and put in your trunk. There must have been an army of forklifts springing into action after the final gavel banged down.
Theft of garden ornaments, ironwork, statuary is a huge problem. Did the sellers offer any kind of provenance for these items? Perhaps they were shipped from, say, the British Isles, where the gardening magazines are all full of tips for bolting down your urns and statues and where "hot" items might be more difficult to sell? It is even a problem in cemeteries. BT would pass on this one.
ReplyDeleteFascinating! That didn't even occur to me, naif that I am. I heard the owner telling somebody that the millstones were mostly from crumbling old mills he had torn down (to reuse the vintage lumber). But the garden stuff -- the provenance of that, I don't know. Thanks for this information.
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