Featured The antique item YOU have owned longest?

Hi,
I have the first antique I ever bought. A black mantle clock made about 1890. I paid 12 dollars for it. To a 10 year old boy 70 years ago 12 dollars was like a thousand dollars today. I paid 3 dollars down and a 1 dollar a month. Still have the clock.
greg

 

I'm so jealous.. I desperately want a black mantel clock.

 

Hi Bluemoon,
Here is my clock, I have three others
greg

 

Sweet!
HOW RUDE!

 

Is that a relative of yours in the photo, Greg?

 

Everyone run away........ZEKA virus.....run away !!!!!!!!!

 

I started attending auctions with my parents and grandfather during high school and caught the collecting bug. Didn't have a job in high school so money was tight, basically whatever I could get out of my parents for allowance + birthday and Christmas money. Here is my collection circa 2006 when I was 17 years old. Sorry about the terrible pics, I dug these pictures out of my photo archive and my photography skills are much improved since 2006.

My first piece of McCoy Pottery was the barn on the top shelf of the bookcase, it was produced specifically for the 2003 Ohio Bicentennial so it is not an antique. I started collecting vintage McCoy potter soon after. My first political pinback was a FDR pin that I got from a flea market vendor for $15. My first coin was a 1857 Flying Eagle Cent purchased in the late 1990's for $17. I'm more of an accumulator than anything else so I wouldn't be surprised if I still had all of these items stashed in my hoard with the exception of maybe one or two.

 

I have my (paternal side) great-grandmother's hand-sewn black "widow's bonnet" from 1885. I have had it since the late 1960s when my grandmother (her only child) died.

Please indulge me in posting the following inscription on my great-grandmother's gravestone:

"We miss thy kind and willing hand, thy fond and earnest care, our home is dark without thee, we miss thee everywhere."

 

Hi Fig,
He is my great grandfathers brother.
greg

 

My oldest piece that I've had the longest is a McKinley campaign button collected by one of my grandmother's brothers. She wasn't born yet, so she couldn't have gotten it herself. The oldest piece I bought myself that I still have...dunno. Do mineral samples count? My mom brought back a first century oil lamp from her trip to Israel in the 50s. It's still in the house somewhere.

 

I do have an Uncle's Red Cross button collection from when he worked for them long ago.
They start in the early 1900s.

 

I *think* that the antique(s) I've had the longest are the James Dixon britannia tea and coffee pots, made about 1835-1840, that my grandmother passed on to me sometime after my marriage in 1969 and before she died in 1973.

We believe that they were brought over by her paternal grandfather when he emigrated in 1842.

 

I was going to say the same thing.


Adding:
So I started collecting when I was about 10. Still have the perfume bottle collection, cup and saucer collection, and bead collection.

The oldest item I purchased a few years ago and is a piece of French enamel from the late 1700s.

 

My Grandmother passed away in 1969 and my grandfather was no longer fit to live on his own in the family home. It was a 16 room late 19th century Queen Anne Victorian with most of the original furnishings from my great grandparents still intact. Despite my mom and her 2 siblings taking quite a bit, there was still plenty left over for a huge estate auction. The day of the sale, I asked if I could keep the old Oliver typewriter like this one here....



I was 14 at the time and still have it.

After the sale, there was an old walnut spool bed in pieces in the garage that did not sell. I also brought those pieces home and began my first refinishing project. Once I got it stripped, I realized that all the pieces were not there to reassemble. I still have this unfinished bed and have since found some appropriate pieces to finish the project started so long ago. Unfortunately, life is more hectic than when I was 14 and this project is not a priority. I plan to finish it before I am done on this Earth. It will need to become a priority at some point.

Since my parent's passing, I have inherited other pieces from the family home. They are better pieces than these two things but I have not had them nearly as long. Attending my grandparent's estate auction first got me interested in antiques and I never looked back. By the time I was 18, I was collecting and selling to further my collection. I don't have any other antiques left from those early days but have kept all the family pieces.

As an aside, I started collecting other things even earlier than antiques. I still have my rock and mineral collection that I started when I was about 8 or 9. Like with the antiques, a couple of these pieces are things my Grandfather collected when he was a teenager.

 

Nice!
If you're still into minerals check out the Franklin Mine in NW NJ.

 

My sister had one of the Japanese teasets with faces in the base of the cups. Her husband was a merchant seaman in the 1950's. When he docked in Japan he had 4 sets, inc teapot posted to various relatives,(it was part of the service) as did most of the crew. Thay all arrived intact. Hailing from a seafaring family in a seafaring port, I could always spot if someone had had a mariner in the family by the things in their house.

 

My item is a miniature potty with with words "go way back and sit down" it was 55 year ago and our neighbour died. I was really upset when I saw all his things being thrown away. I salvaged the potty and still have it after 55 years. It is not worth anything, just memories.

 

In terms of inherited items...my grandmother's Singer 99 sewing machine from the 50s, which I formally took possession of, about a year after she died in 2011.

...other than that, I still have my 1860s campaign writing box:



I'd lusted after one of these since I was five or six years old, ever since I first saw one in an antiques shop. But the prices that they sell for around here are often prohibitively expensive, and often in terrible condition.

I picked this one up about 2010, during my second trip to London. The guy I bought it from had purchased it at auction about three months before and hadn't been able to shift it, despite repeated discounts. So I managed to get it at a price I could finally afford, and brought it home. It took me about four years to get it to the complete state that you see now. It is arguably my most treasured possession.

Wild dogs wouldn't part me from it.

Other antiques might come and go, but this one, I'll hold onto forever.