A Surprise Purchase and An Unexpected Buckhead Connection: Five Gallon Kline & Brown Churn

At one point just before the crowd started to thin out toward mid-afternoon, the auctioneer, Greg Peters (no relation), had one of his assistants turn on the air-conditioning in the big room that had become stuffy enough for people to start using their xeroxed auction catalogues as fans. Having recently moved to Atlanta from Cleveland, Ohio, this struck me as a bit funny for December 31^st. This auction was at the Golden Memories Auction Company in Mountain City, Georgia where Peters is not simply the auctioneer but the owner as well. (I wrote in an earlier post about the Slotin Folk Art Auction in Buford, GA.)  Arriving about a half hour before the gavel at 10:00 a.m., Jim, a school colleague and friend, and I had time to look over the nearly five hundred lots of furniture, clocks, porcelain, and pottery. We spent the most time looking at the pottery, and there was much to be interested in. The long and the short of the auction is, however, that I was runner-up on the pieces I wanted most.Despite the slight disappointment of missing out on the pots I liked best, Peters was entertaining and moved things along at a good clip. When a bidder on a piece was hesitant he would say, “I think I would,” and inevitably it seems he or she would bid it up a bit higher. When a piece was arriving to bid that he knew should draw attention, he would say, “Raise your sights!”—those pieces tended to go at least a $1000 dollars or higher. To emphasize the flawlessness of an item, he would say, “doesn’t get better than this.” And if bidding closed at a price far lower than he expected, he would lament, “mark that a bargain” as the jug, or highboy, or clock was removed to the back room to await payment and pick-up.After missing out on the pieces I had shot for, there was some more pottery that was intriguing enough to delay our trip home another hour or so. And here is where I made a classic mistake. When something comes up to be auctioned, oftentimes the auctioneer will start high and quickly drop the price low enough to simply get the bidding started. All of the pottery left was old and in good shape, so I assumed none would go less than a couple of hundred dollars. So…when “#307 Rare Kline & Brown Atlanta, GA 5 Gal.; Kline and Brown potted together for only one year 17 1/2” tall” came up I was happy to open the bidding when he dropped it to the very low opening price of $100. You can guess the punchline—

After bidding I actually stopped paying attention for a second or two, only to be brought back to reality when Peters asked for my bidder number. The look on my face must have betrayed my surprise because he said, “I know–I can’t believe it either.”After getting home yesterday I quickly tried to find out more about my new purchase, and I almost immediately became more comfortable with having bought it. A quick search revealed that the two were partners sometime soon after 1883 when Charles Kline married Emma Brown. His partner was likely his new father in law, William Brown. The most interesting detail, however, is that the two worked together next to Howell’s Mill, which is very near where we live, and the clay was almost certainly dug from Nancy Creek–the same Nancy Creek runs through Westminster’s campus, and that I have written about before. [My source for all this is Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery by John A. Burrison, University of Georgia Press, 2008].So I am learning a lesson the easy way–I don’t plan on being the first bidder again anytime soon; however, I am certainly glad I made the mistake this time.[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=safari&q=west+paces+ferry+howell+mill+northside+parkway&safe=on&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Northside+Pky%40Howell+Mill+Rd&ll=33.84612,-84.4281&spn=0.013544,0.025234&t=m&z=14&vpsrc=6&output=embed&w=425&h=350]