Whether a common household item, an elaborate decorative piece, or a forgotten toy, antiques, the physical objects of our past, can connect us to history in a truly hands-on way.

(guitar music) The antiques give you a taste of history on the tangible things, of things you can touch and see.

Antiques at the Cottonwood Ranch are important so people can see how the Pratts lived.

It's really good, you can touch something that they had.

And so you get more of a feeling of how they lived by seeing the things they use, whether it's the wood burning stove, the ice box or in the parlor, the horse hair, upholstered furniture.

Antiques are a part of history.

The Larned Antique Show has been going on for 50 years in Larned, Kansas.

With the Larned Antique Show, you can actually purchase antiques and there's people that are in the business but have collected a lot of things.

Hi, I'm Kristin Keith.

I've been involved in the antique business for about 25 years.

I started small doing flea markets and a couple of shows and then I did some consignments and stores.

My favorite show to do however is the Larned Antiques Show here.

And now I serve as chair of the committee.

This is the 53rd year for the show.

So it's been around a long time.

And when I say show, I mean it's a sale.

They have items for sale.

Tom Seltman was a long time committee member and chair for more years than I honestly know.

He'd been involved since almost the beginning.

He loved the show.

It was so important to him and he took pride in it and we've all just kind of followed his lead on how to make the show a success and the treat our antique dealers, our vendors really well so that they come back year after year.

I've thought a lot about this year, why it's lasted so long.

And I've come up with several reasons.

One of those reasons are the people that are involved.

There's an amazing committee, a very dedicated volunteer.

It's all volunteer that put the show on.

Our dealers here, a lot of them have been involved 20 and 30 years and just say it's their favorite show to do and come back year after year.

We get dealers from two to three different states.

They, a lot of them travel all over the country to pick up unique items.

Well, my name is Joe Dalton and we're from Luray, Kansas.

And we run Dalton Antiques.

And I say we because my wife and I started this about 10 years ago.

I'm Joel Cox.

I'm from Fort Collins, Colorado.

I've been in the antiques business 40 years, I think this year.

My name is Carol Jinkner.

I live in North Central, Kansas and I am at the Larned Antique Show.

It keeps going on.

People keep coming in the door and they keep buying things to add to their lives.

And whether they're adding that quilt or that stack of boxes or that chair in order to beautify their homes or whether they're buying it because they want to resell it or whether they're buying it just because they love it on a real kind of primeval level, artistic level, then we see the same people over and over and we know what they want and we try to bring what they want.

My name is Patricia Edmonds Evans.

And I live in rural Jefferson County, Kansas.

My husband and I travel to do antique shows.

We do tab a shop or do internet.

We like the personal contact of shows.

I just love to find things that I'll never see again or that people never seen again.

There's several items in this booth that you'll never see again, period.

They're basically almost as close to one of a kind as you can get.

And I love the history.

I love researching things that I know nothing about and preserving it.

I hate seeing stuff like this thrown in a dump.

What I like about doing shows is there are a lot of show dealers you get to know and so it's kind of a community.

We're competitive, but we're also very supportive of each other too.

That's what I enjoy.

But you tend to see the same dealers again and again and you know one another and your friends, even though you may only see someone twice a year.

I grew up in a house where my mother made quilts.

She made probably two or three quilts a year and she embroidered and she crocheted and she knitted.

And so she made our house a pretty place with all of her needlework.

And so I got interested in quilts and I thought that I needed to make quilts.

Oh, I did not have the patience for that.

So I thought, well, what else could I do because I want quilts?

So I began buying other people's old quilts.

Well, that's about the time when the quilt projects, the state quilt projects all got started.

States across the United States, I think it probably started with the Bicentennial in 1976.

They got interested in quilt history.

As far as I know, most of the 50 states have completed their, I guess, survey of quilts across the state.

I worked on the Kansas quilt project and I worked on the Oklahoma quilt project.

From there, it wasn't a big leap to getting interested in history.

And I really got interested in women's history because women were primarily the ones that made these things that I wanted.

What is it about antiques that you think people are so fascinated with?

I think it brings up a lot of memories for them, things that they had in their childhood, things that remind them of their grandparents' home, not just seeing the objects, but the smell you get when you walk into an antique show.

A lot of things that I sell are things that people remember their grandparents having.

And I've always found it to be a two-generation.

They didn't really connect to what their parents had, but it was more, I remember my grandmother had that.

And so it had that sentiment about it.

So there's that, but then there's also just the actual history of it as people begin to examine their past and they don't just want the written word, but they want the artifacts also.

That's largely what it is, I think.

It's having that thing that you can actually hold.

A lot of people have interest in the history aspect.

Like I do, the stories behind objects.

Just, it's neat when you buy an object, if the dealer knows the provenance behind that object, like where it came from, who owned it.

Every object tells a story.

The big thing is that I see is that you get the people, they wanna learn something about this.

And that's hopefully, and like I said, I don't know everything.

I don't even come close to pretend to know everything.

But the pieces that I have, I spend enough time researching it, that when people come in and ask me questions, they're amazed.

And especially when you're looking at an item, I have a typewriter in here that's 120 years old.

It looks like the day it was made and it still works.

This is an 1898 Hammond typewriter.

This thing's over, is that old.

It still works.

It's still functional.

We can't do anything like that anymore.

And then as a woodworker and a carpenter, this is a molded piece of wood.

This is one piece with the seam in the back.

And this is one piece.

And this is over 120 years old.

And it looks like this today.

And then the exciting thing, people that love advertisement, it's written in four languages inside the box and all that's still in there.

But you can literally sit down and type with this typewriter right now.

You've seen Coca-Cola cases.

This is a rounded corner Coca-Cola case.

They only made them for five years.

This one is a 1948.

When you're looking for things, those are unique things.

I didn't even know they made it until a year ago when I found this.

But then this was one piece of wood that seemed one place and they had to steam that and bend it.

Well, after World War II, that got to be pretty expensive.

So they made them for five years and never made them again.

This is a double-sided porcelain chair.

And that's the original porcelain that's on it.

Unique to find it.

I've only seen this one.

I've never seen another one, but I've heard of them.

When people come in here, and that's what I'll spend 90% of my time doing tomorrow and doing Saturday is people ask me questions because what is this?

I've never seen nothing like this.

This piece was made in 1908 and it has all the markings and everything like that to tell you that that's when it was made.

And what this does, you have the sun, the first planet, the earth and the moon.

And on this base here, you have every month of the year, you have every season of the year, and you have all the zodiac signs on there.

So as you take this and rotate this around, wherever this is right now and wherever this is pointing, this says May, Scorpio and Spring.

This is what you use in science classes.

I remember seeing one back in the fifties, and they are impossible to find.

I love to educate people, especially young people.

I get excited when young people come in and they're asking questions or what it's all about.

And I never get anybody to tell me, I wish I wouldn't have wasted my time with it.

They're amazed.

They want to know the story.

We all enjoyed to have what they call the provenance of an item, who it belonged to.

And I really do enjoy being able to buy things out of a house where I know the family history.

And of course, it's always kind of sad that that item is leaving the family, but so often we find that there either aren't family members to pass it on to or the family members don't have a particular interest in it.

But I do enjoy having that connection.

And it helps because when people are buying an object, they do like to know that that came out of so-and-so's house or some town in particular, some state and yeah, it just helps to know the history.

Yeah, do people like connecting to a different period of time as well?

I think they do.

Sometimes it's just a matter of aesthetics, that they enjoyed the, that culture from that period and the things that were in style in that period, just the different aesthetics that different periods represent.

And you'll notice that that will shift.

This is a chair, it's made by Charles Lindbergh Company out of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

And it is in the style of arts and crafts, which is popular very early 1900s, up to about World War I.

There are certain features of an arts and craft chair that tell you it was made by a good maker.

The leg posts come up, clear up through the arm.

And then there's a peg dowel that goes in to the leg post and that's how that's attached.

The arts and crafts makers wanted to use the construction of the furniture to be the decoration of the furniture.

They wanted to do away with all the fancy frou-frou Victorian things, keep the line simple, but let the construction of the piece speak for itself and stand out.

So this on the other hand is a Swedish piece of furniture the lady's grandparents that come from Sweden in 1906 and they brought this chest of furniture with them.

It's interesting because in the top drawer here are a bunch of little drawers.

And the little drawers have ivory knobs on them.

A lot of Scandinavian furniture you see, probably most of it, is painted furniture.

So I've actually never seen this type of chest of drawer before.

You kind of find what really works for you and what you would like to have at your house and make you feel like that's your home.

You're not an antique collector, but you might come and see a lamp that you like or a piece of artwork that really speaks to you.

You wanna take that and put it in your home.

You know, the best homes in my opinion have a mix of antiques and modern things and things you've picked up on trips.

So we encourage people just to come to do that.

Also, you might have an heirloom at home that you inherited it and you're curious about the value of it or a story behind it.

And this is a great place to come and find something similar or talk to an antique dealer that can really give you some information on what you have and even an appraisal.

We specialize in American-made cast iron doorstops and book ends.

And that is our first love and we know more about that than probably anything.

These are from the Hubley Company, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, hand-painted, beautiful, beautiful quail book ends.

We can identify the companies.

If there isn't a company name on there, they usually had some kind of a mold abbreviation.

So there's a way of identifying for most of the cast iron what it was.

The exception is hardly any of the Boston Bulldogs from the 1920s and 30s had any marking on the back so we don't have any clue.

Every American company made a Boston because they were so popular because of the President's dog.

You can even learn all kinds of about history.

At that time I was here, something bronze, which wasn't very colorful.

Could be really beautiful work.

But people were looking for something in color and the foundry men were putting out these beautiful molds and the women were in the studio hand painting.

These are Raggedy-Anne and Andy book ends, original paint, 1931.

They came with a set of books, like an encyclopedia kind of set of books.

And they're in original condition and good condition.

They're very rare.

Several companies made these.

They made these hand-painted cast iron pieces for the World War I soldiers picture after the war.

So 1920s and 30s is what we look for.

And some of it has in the 50s and 60s has been reproduced so you have to either study up and know and learn what was old and what's a reproduction.

And just a rule of thumb is that the women that were in the studio hand painting and going to that trouble, making the different colors and that kind of thing, normally a reproduction will be kind of a whitewash and then a sprinkling of paint on there.

But not always.

I truly admire a craftsman where I've become more involved in art and I start looking at artifacts as art and how they were made.

And that's always been important to me with clocks because clock mechanisms are extremely technical and well crafted and making the internal mechanism plus the case.

It's just awe inspiring to me.

The things that I really like tend to be the more utilitarian things where they made these things to use them up.

I mean, think about that.

Think about getting this quilt over here beside me and using it and using it and using it until it was literally in tatters but you put all that work into it.

I just like the household things, the things that women made.

The samplers.

Now there's a real hands-on link to someone who lived 200 years ago.

I've got a sampler from 1796.

A lot of them are 1840s.

It's hard to get the American ones.

The American ones are almost double the value of the English ones but there are a lot more English ones.

But samplers, which are usually children's needlework in the early days, like that little red and white one over there.

It's got initials and ages on it and it was probably a child's piece.

And the more elaborate ones that came along like in the Victorian period, a lot of it was women's fancy work.

But initially, these were used to help young girls learn their alphabets and their numbers as well as that all-important stitching because they were gonna be responsible for creating most of the clothing in the household.

You know, it's not hard to connect with antiques through family generations.

I knew a lady when we lived in Texas who had a quilt that had been made about 1800 and that had traveled down through her family in Virginia, down to Georgia and then with her to Texas.

And so that was a real tangible connection to her foremothers.

But when you don't have that family connection, I think you can still connect with the past through the things that you buy.

You know, you just come to wonder about why this was made and what kind of love and care went into it and what was it used for.

It's like these two boxes on the floor, they're egg boxes.

And we don't even think about things like that anymore.

But they were used to carry eggs to the market.

And baskets were another thing.

They're utilitarian items, but they had a significant role in every family.

The ones that fit over your arm and were fairly spacious were market baskets.

You went and did your marketing with them so that everything was made for use.

To me, I've always had the opinion that these are items that are just passing through my hands and I'm a caretaker of them.

You know, and I wanna pass them on to somebody else with that same appreciation.

It's neat how the show's gone on for 53 years, but the show, as well as the antique business has changed so much.

Back 50 years ago when the show started, things would have looked very different.

You would have walked in and every table would have been covered in a black tablecloth and everything would have been behind glass cases and just lights everywhere.

And people who came to the show would have worn their sunny best.

I mean, it was a big to-do, you know, it was a special place to come.

It might've been wealthier people that came because the merchandise was higher end glassware and furniture.

But I like now that there's something for everyone here from all price points.

Probably if they come to a show like this, it has such a varied selection of years represented, pieces represented and a variety, that there'll probably be something that strikes them as interesting and usually it's so beautifully made quality wise.

We try to really push in our community that you don't have to be a serious antique collector to come to the show.

Just come and see what we're about.

You don't know what you need until you see it is what I like to tell people.

If it connects with their interest in history or whether it's a personal connection in the family or a friend or a belief.

I see people pause and all this stuff is about memories because they looked at that yellowware bowl, a couple of younger ladies, and they said, well, I remember helping grandma make bread in this.

You know, and so really these antique things bring back a lot of memories.

They may not be the bread bowl, but it's like the bread bowl.

So history is easily forgettable if there's not people who continue to tell those stories.

All of these objects have a story behind them.

They represent the time and the place in which they originally lived.

These objects help us remember what life has been like in the past.

And you can look at the object and it just jogs your memory and helps keep that history alive.

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