Museum Collection Auction, Saturday Morning, July 29th @ 9:30 A.M.
Stanton’s Auctioneers are pleased to announce that we will hold an auction of antiques currently owned by Michigan Gateway Foundation on July 29 at the Mathews Library Conference Center East on the campus of Southwestern Michigan College, 58900 Cherry Grove Road, Dowagiac, Michigan. The auction will consist of artifacts from the collection acquired by Southwestern Michigan College from 1968 to the early 2000s when it housed a local history museum. The items in the auction will be artifacts that have no local history connection or are duplicate items in the collection.
About 2,000 items will be in the auction. Several highlighted collections that will be in the auction are:
· Collection of 800 Circus posters, programs and other circus ephemera donated to the college in the mid-1980s by Dr. Paul Fitzpatrick; Large collection of wood planes and other carpenter tools; Household items and tools; Civil War papers of Isaac McMillan of Company A, 75th Indiana Infantry; A Very rare Hand-carved walking cane from the Polk-Dallas Presidential campaign of 1844; Duplicate items from the Round Oak collection; Spinning wheels; Commemorative books from the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 are some of the items to be sold.
All proceeds from the auction will go to the construction of a new Collections Storage Addition at the Dowagiac Area History Museum, which replaced Southwestern Michigan College’s local history museum in 2012 as the local history repository. The new storage addition will house the remaining 20,000 local history artifacts that document the history of Dowagiac and Cass County.
We have just begun working on the sale, watch for up dates and photographs.