Startling discoveries in a Fountain City home
by Jack Neely
It's just a brick house on a corner of a tree-shaded neighborhood in Fountain City. A comfortable-looking two-story place, probably 1930s, a casually kept yard with an assortment of old trees, some doing better than others.
Inside it's dark even with all the lights on. The dingy wallpaper's peeling badly, the ceilings are covered in yellowed acoustical tile. A year ago, it was the home of a widow who worked at Broadway Baptist Church. It's not be the sort of place where you expect extravagant surprises.
Still, when he first stepped inside the house, veteran antique dealer John Coker says, "My eyes just popped!"
After 28 years in the antique business, John Coker's not easy to startle. The New Market-based dealer has handled the estates of some of Knoxville's most prominent families. He helped fit out the Mabry-Hazen house, helped settle the McClungs' Bel Caro estate.
He'd never seen anything like the house on Robin Road. Until her death last November, it was the home of septuagenarian Hilda Ayres. Her husband William Ayres, who'd been a World War II pilot and an engineer at Southern Cast Stone on Sutherland, died in 1993. You can see his handiwork around the yard: ornamental pieces and benches of an almost aeronautical design made of pebbly concrete.
The two moved in here in the '50s. From Fayette, Ala., they made a striking couple, he 15 inches taller than she. Compatible in the respects that count, they lived modestly—except that, once in a while, they'd take a trip somewhere and come home with a station wagon loaded with very old things.
When Coker walked in the back door, hundreds of rare antiques crowded the relatively small house. "I hesitate to use the term King Tut's tomb," Coker says. "But it wouldn't be entirely inappropriate."
Talking about it, Coker seems dazed, as if he'd been kicked in the head. "You just don't see this in Knoxville!" he says repeatedly as he re-tours the house, preparing for the auction next weekend. "You could go to 10,000 houses and not find this!"
In a kitchen cabinet are children's dishes with pictures emblazoned on them. One shows two groups of children evenly matched in serious a tug of war; it's marked FRENCH AND ENGLISH. Just one Staffordshire bowl is a find. A dozen together is a cache. They're all handy here, as if Mrs. Ayres expected to use them for ice cream. She did use several of her antique dishes, even to convey homebaked cakes to neighbors.
There's a platter with depictions of figures along a pastoral shore marked HARPER'S FERRY, U.S. Coker believes this platter is older than John Brown's 1859 raid that made the place famous.
There are homelier things, like quilts and colorful needlepoint samplers; one of the finest has its maker's name: Jane Ballards Sampler Age 10 Years. It's something you might expect to find hanging on a kid's bedroom wall.
Beneath it is a depiction of a little girl in an elaborate Marie Antoinette hairdo and a hoop skirt with a strange-looking pet that's something like a lamb. Carefully knitted into the sampler is a poem that starts: Tell me, ye knowing and charming few/Where I may find a friend both fine and true.... It's an impressive piece of work for any fifth grader, and you want to tell her so. But then you notice the stitched-in date: 1799. This little girl might have died of old age before Lincoln's presidency.
We'll never know for certain. Coker and the family have found no stories attached to the pieces, nor even any record of where they came from.
There are oddities: a set of milk-truck bells. A wooden cigar maker. Seven concentric balls, carved out of one piece of ivory. Decorative eggs made of plique a jour—colorful enamel within a delicate metal framework. Women's spittoons, gaily decorated; one, handpainted with bluebirds.
Coker picks up a gaily decorated porcelain cylinder with a gliding plunger. "I don't even know what this is!" says the dealer. His astonishment outweighs any embarrassment about this gap in his expertise. "I call it a garlic press."
Small of stature herself, Mrs. Ayres was fascinated with smallish things. Here's a child's miniature Victorian sewing machine. "Today it would be highly illegal," Coker says. "It's a working sewing machine! A child could sew her fingers into it."
Downstairs is some stuff you'd expect to find in any basement: an old lawnmower engine, for example. But this one happens to be a REO model. The clean one-cylinder job is older than the house.
Mrs. Ayres used several of these 150-year-old antiques for their original purpose. The antebellum candleholders on the walls hold candles. However, Mrs. Ayres drew the line at spittoons; she improved hers with fragrant potpourri.
"She was interested in early," he says. "The older it was, the better."
There's a large but portable wooden desk, with drawers and iron-butterfly hinges. Carved with scrollwork into the dark wood—English oak, Coker says—are the initials E and M. Coker thinks this "pilgrim-style" desk is 300 years old.
It's not the oldest thing here. That would be in another room, resting on an old desk. You might mistake the thing for a silver condiment tray, with a handle. Crude in style, but with some elaborate scrollwork on the sides, in patterns you don't see often.
Coker says it's a stirrup. Guessing it's German in origin, he says it's a few centuries old: his estimate is mid-1500s. It's wide, too. "You could put a knight's foot in there," Coker says.
The estimable Mrs. Ayres used it, on occasion, as a napkin holder.
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