Killer Stuff and Tons of Money by Maureen Stanton

Author:Maureen Stanton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

LIKE CURT AVERY and Ken Hartwell, Jimmy’s interest in antiques began from the ground up—he too was a bottle digger. “My friends and I found this old cellar hole in the woods. We started digging out the rubble. I found a rusty part to a musket. You wonder who lived there. When you are a kid, in your mind, it was Daniel Boone.” Bottle digging fostered Jimmy’s curiosity about the whole spectrum of antiques. After college, he worked as a cabinet maker for a company that moved old houses. “If there was a great eighteenth-century home in the way of a new school, my company would dismantle it, sell it to some wealthy person, take it apart, number it, and reassemble it on their lot. I made all the interior millwork, the moldings, the raised paneling, all authentic.” When New England suffered a recession, “out of necessity,” he began to set up at antique shows. “I thought maybe I could supplement my income, but that just took off. I never went back to the cabinet making.” Like Avery, Jimmy has the antique fever, especially for figural pottery. “I’m not just a dealer,” he says, “I love this stuff. I’m an addict with a habit.”

The very first object Jimmy bought on eBay, around 1999, was a piece of redware listed as an “old drip glazed pot.” It was a piece that Curt Avery had been watching, too. “They didn’t use the term redware,” Jimmy says. He didn’t know for sure what the pot was, only that it was “very early” and had an “interesting glaze.” He bid $350 and won the piece for $140. “As soon as I got it, I e-mailed the auction to Curt, and said, ‘Hey Curt, my first eBay purchase, what do you think?’” Jimmy sold the pot to Curt for $500. A while later, Jimmy saw a photo of the same pot, only missing its lid, at a Virginia auction. He called the auctioneer to find out the sale price. “The guy goes, ‘Oh, you mean the Great Road crock?’ There was a potter, I believe his last name was Cain, who had a pottery on this Great Road in Tennessee.”

The Great Road, originally part of an Indian trail called the Great Warrior Path, was a major route from Philadelphia across Virginia, dipping down into northern Tennessee. Horseback riders and pioneers towing handcarts loaded with their worldly possessions followed the path to the new frontier. By the late eighteenth century, the Great Road and its tributaries were crowded with horse- (or cow-) drawn wagons. Potters set up shop to sell necessities—preserve jars, liquor jugs, tableware—to the westward traffic. The 1850 census recorded thirteen potters in counties along the Great Road in Virginia and Tennessee. The Cains were a pottery dynasty, started by Leonard Cain around 1814. His sons, Abraham, William, and Eli, continued the family vocation. His grandson Martin Cain potted until the early 1900s, the last of the Cain family potters.

The Great Road pottery Jimmy had seen in the paper had sold for $12,500 at the Virginia auction.

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