Published: October 15, 2008 11:15 pm      

Cullen: Season ends on searching sales

As the wistful old saying goes, "Home is the sailor, home from the seas, and the hunter home from the hills."

The 2008 yard sale season is ebbing to a close. This

grizzled hunter is looking back over another memorable safari, studded with prize trophies.

My sister and I have been "hitting the sales" together for years. Often, on a summer Saturday, we’ll stop at 10 or 15 of the 125 or more listed in the newspaper.

I’ve waded through enough worthless junk to fill Memorial Stadium, but I’m still amazed -even shocked — by the wonderful old things that still turn up.

My best buy this year was a rare piece of Southern furniture called the "sugar chest."

In the 1830s and 1840s, in backwoods Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama, sugar was a precious commodity. Often, you could buy an acre of land for the price of a pound of sugar.

Plantations were bustling places, with lots of visitors and large staffs. Sugar had to be shipped upriver, so plantation owners stocked up on it and locked it up in wooden

chests that stood on turned legs to keep the mice out. The sugar chest sat in the dining room, and it was seen as a symbol of wealth.

My sugar chest is about two feet wide, and made of thin walnut boards, planed smooth and pinned together with wooden dowels. The previous owner had no idea what it was. I got it for $25. It’s definitely a keeper.

Another great find came a month or so ago, while driving to the hardware store at 1 p.m. on a Saturday. For some reason, I stopped at a picked-over garage sale that had been going since 8 a.m. Inside a cardboard box filled with battered old Bibles and hymnals sat a little hardcover book titled "Tippecanoe Songs." As soon as I opened the cover, I shelled out my $2 and made a bee-line for the truck.

It was a rare, bound collection of campaign songs, poems, limericks and woodcuts from the "Log Cabin and Hard Cider" presidential campaign of 1840. The little pamphlets promoted the election of Gen. William Henry Harrison, "Old Tipp," the hero of the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe and standard-bearer of the "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too" ticket. Harrison won the election, but he died a month later and was succeeded by John Tyler.

It’s a museum piece, and I couldn’t believe that I’d found it at a garage sale. I was even more stunned when I turned the flyleaf and found the inscription, "B. Harrison, Indianapolis, 1888." Yes, it was signed by "Old Tipp’s" grandson, Benjamin Harrison, who was himself elected president in 1888. His house in downtown Indianapolis is a state museum.

I got one more really great book this summer, but I had to pay $10 for it. It’s the autobiography of Ernest Thompson Seton, 1860-1946, a best-selling nature writer and illustrator who, with Dan Carter Beard, co-founded the Boy Scouts of America and wrote their first handbook.

It’s more than a wonderful book about an important man. Inside was a letter to the original owner on Seton’s letterhead from Seton’s wife, Julia; a flier promoting Seton’s lecture series; a price sheet for Seton’s books, and a newspaper obituary published the day he died.

But the best part is the title page, on which Seton wrote, in fountain pen: "To Genevieve H. Hanna with best wishes of Ernest Thompson Seton, 7th November 1941." Next to his name he drew his trademark symbol: the pawprint of a gray wolf.

Discoveries like that make me keep trolling the sales. I feel like the hunter, home from the hills.

Danville native Kevin Cullen is a former Commercial-News reporter. Reach him at irishhiker@aol.com.