Over the past 30 years, Jody McMorrow has auctioned off a lot of things. Antique furniture. Old cars. The stuff a person accumulates over a lifetime.

But next week, McMorrow will sell a collection so rare he’s never seen one before. It is more than 40 sleighs and buggies from the 1800s and early 1900s.

“It’s history,” he said. “You just don’t see this many in one spot.”

The collection belonged to Carl Huston Sr., a Lisbon Falls contractor who spent 20 years buying horse-drawn carriages, some of them from McMorrow’s own auctions.

Huston’s son, Carl Huston Jr., called his father “a farm boy at heart.” He believes Huston collected old carriages in honor of his childhood on the farm.

When Huston died of cancer last summer, the 77-year-old left behind a wife, three children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He also left a large collection rarely seen in Maine’s auction circles.

While most of the sleighs and buggies need work — wood is frayed and broken, springs and stuffing poke out of seat cushions or parts are missing — McMorrow can see the possibilities in them.  

“Somebody’s just going to love this,” he said, running his hand along the worn frame of a buggy with back and front seats. “You can take the kids out in this one.”

Even on the roughest carriages, he points out the details that make them unique: tiny metal eagle ornaments on the front of one, the side grooves of another.

“There’s an artistry when they made these,” he said.

A few of the carriages are in good condition, including a fancy, covered black buggy built with springs to give its wealthy owners a smoother ride. 

“It’s like driving a Cadillac, rather than driving an old buckboard,” McMorrow said.

The carriage in the best condition is an old farm wagon Huston had restored before he died. The glossy, yellow-wood carriage with yellow wheels and black accents sits in a building at McMorrow Auctions in Poland.

The younger Huston believes that buggy was his father’s favorite. It took an expert in Bethel years to get it in pristine condition. Huston never balked at the cost.

“I would say that’s probably what he used to use, something similar to that, when he was a kid,” the younger Huston said.

Although Huston’s collection featured buggies and sleighs, it also included myriad carriage parts and wheels, a selection of antique scales, an orchard sprayer likely from the early 1900s and a shiny black 1930 Model A Ford.

Although he’d had the Ford restored, Huston never got a chance to take it for a ride.

“My sister had taken him to the doctors that day and (the body shop workers) wanted to give him that ride. He never got it,” the younger Huston said.

The collection will be auctioned at 10 a.m. Saturday, June 9, at McMorrow’s Auction Hall in Poland. McMorrow believes some items are worth $50; others are worth several thousand dollars.

The collection is too large for the family to continue to store. The younger Huston believes his father would be OK with seeing his carriages and other items sold. He’d planned to sell it off piece by piece to supplement his retirement.

But that doesn’t mean the younger Huston will be there to watch it go.

“I don’t think I can,” he said. “I know it has to be done, but I don’t know if I can really be there.”

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