POLAND – A Maine family’s collection of letters, photos, fliers and broadsheets as old as the state itself drew a standing-room crowd and thousands of dollars in bids Friday.
“It’s an astounding collection,” said Theresa Barnes of Bridgton, who sat through the five-hour auction. “This is clearly an untouched estate.”
Letters from the California gold rush drew as much as $900 each. A century-old letter signed by Joshua Chamberlain drew $850. And a collection of nautical cards, gathered in various foreign ports, earned a winning bid of $1,700.
“This family never threw a thing away,” auctioneer Jody McMorrow said midway through the nearly 400 lots that were sold on the first day of the two-day event. Wearing a wireless microphone, he told bidders, “You’ll never guess where I found all this.”
The artifacts were discovered in the attic of Harpswell’s oldest home, the Dunning farm. The family was one of the most prominent in the coastal town and one of the most traveled.
Among the four generations represented at the auction – from the 1820s to the World War II era – were two Dunning brothers who mined gold in California, one who owned land in England and several who piloted ships around the world.
On Saturday, bidders are scheduled to purchase the Dunnings’ furniture: items ranging from bureaus and chairs to a power-producing conveyor belt on which dogs, goats or sheep might run.
Friday’s auction was for books and paper.
People began gathering at the Route 11 auction house at 9 a.m., poking through dozens of boxes and hundreds of individual lots, each wrapped in protective plastic.
In the first 15 minutes, several thousand dollars worth of items were sold.
Gold rush-era tintypes sold for more than $500 each. The accompanying letters, including the mention of a bandit named “Three-Fingered Jack,” each drew hundreds more.
Collector James Arsenault of Arrowsic bought as many as he could.
“It’s not rare material, exactly,” said Arsenault, who spent several thousand dollars. “In the 19th century, a lot of people left Maine for the gold rush.”
Arsenault sells rare books, papers and maps on the Internet and at big-city conventions. Among his for-sale items is a Thomas Jefferson letter from Paris. The price: $110,000.
Arsenault wasn’t alone. Bidders included antique dealers and auctioneers from around southern and central Maine.
Theresa Barnes was buying up goods for resale on the eBay Internet site. She purchased three handwritten poems for $10 each.
Not everyone was buying for resale.
Sailing enthusiasts Dan and Kristen King bought a 19th-century page of handwritten nautical formulas, which they carefully examined before the auction began.
The Cumberland couple liked the concept of someone making those calculations without the help of a modern computer or calculator.
They also made an impulsive buy, picking up a leather-bound book of stories titled “Percy’s Anecdotes.”
“We bought that one because our dog’s name is Percy,” Dan King said.
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