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Home, shop and collection of local antiques dealers to be auctioned next month. Date published: 2/24/2006
IF YOU’VE EVER wondered what the operators of an antiques shop decide to keep for themselves, here’s your chance. Anyone familiar with downtown Fredericksburg has probably noticed the combination Victorian home and antiques shop at the corner of Caroline and Wolfe streets. Of course it’s a choice piece of real estate that enjoys Commercial Downtown zoning. Of course there was always an interesting assortment of items for sale in the Century Shop, as the adjoining store is known. But what’s inside the house? The two gentlemen owners of the property, the late Stanley Reese Beard and Edward Shiflett, had owned Grandma’s Attic Antiques in Manassas since 1958. The lifelong partners came to Fredericksburg and bought 528 Caroline St. in 1984. Ed Shiflett died in 2001; Reese Beard died two months ago on Christmas Day. In the absence of offspring, their relatives have decided to auction the property and its contents. Nicholls Auction Co. will handle the sales, with the real estate being auctioned at the site at 10 a.m. March 17 and the contents a day later at 9:30 a.m. A caretaker is living at the house. When he first saw the collection inside the house, auctioneer John Nicholls said, he wasn’t sure what to think. “My head was spinning with logistics,” he said. “How am I going to present this?” Nicholls has arranged with Augustine’s restaurant at Fredericksburg Square, across the street at 528 Caroline St., to host the sale. There, a large screen will be set up for a closed-circuit broadcast of each lot that’s up for bids. Visit nichollsauction.com for the details, including preview dates and times. Prospective bidders will be able to purchase catalogs that provide lot-by-lot descriptions and many pictures of the items. Nicholls said the company enlisted the services of Christine Corbin, a veteran appraiser with a Richmond auction company, to number and organize the collection. She ended up with 674 lots, which range from a set of china to an individual piece of artwork. “The house was really stuffed with cool French and Oriental art. They were collectors, and apparently kept the best for themselves,” said Corbin. “There are lots of great garden ornaments, miniature portraits, oil paintings, silver, figurines, statuary and more than anyone can name.”
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