Huge auction was just the beginning

BY ROSE POST
SALISBURY POST

FAITH — This is the auction of the century, someone said when the gavel began to bang on the big Stirewalt liquidation sale at 9:30 Saturday morning.

Well, who knows? This century is still young.

And who measures auctions?

But no one in the crowd of close to 300 who arrived early and stayed late doubted that it was an auction they would remember, full of antiques acquired by an expert, of collectibles saved by a woman who couldn’t get rid of anything, and the thises and thats left behind by generations of people living in the Stirewalt family home behind Shiloh United Church of Christ.

“It was a shotgun start, ” says Dale Peeler, grandson of Weldon “Ennie” and Helen McCombs Stirewalt, with people waiting for the auctioneer to begin a rapid fire pace that continued throughout the day for family members and antique dealers and old friends and people hunting for bargains.

Grandpaw Stirewalt died in March 1998, and Grandmaw, in October 1999, and they had a big family — three children, Joe, who always went antiquing with him, Gay Sanderson and Dale’s mother, the late Sherry Peeler, 10 grandkids, 18 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.

So the best way to divide things up, they decided, was to have an auction and let everybody buy what he wanted because there was a lot to have.

Owner-operator of Stirewalt Welding Co., Grandpaw kept on using his shop in downtown Faith to refinish old trunks and telephones and buy and trade antiques and horse saddles.

“And it was full when he died,” Peeler says. “It’s still full of furniture and trunks and telephones that will be auctioned off on July 15. I went into some of those trunks and found old newspapers with box scores with Lou Gehrig’s and Babe Ruth’s names in them. Neat!”

And people used to drive from everywhere to see his grandmother’s doll collection. It was well known, and so was her thimble collection, and both of them were known as pioneers in the antique world.

So antique dealers who knew them from Hillsville, Va., and the Metrolina Fairgrounds in Charlotte were there Saturday, and he expects them back next Saturday when they’ll have another go at it.

Grandpaw, Peeler says, got two plaques for showing at both of those for 25 or more years.

By the end of last Saturday, he says, everybody in the family had bought a memory to save.

“My cousin, Lynn Stirewalt of Salisbury, bought their old-timey organ. On Sundays when we used to eat there after church, we all wanted to play on that organ. He said he dreamed of that organ, and he wanted his kids to play it.”

Peeler himself bought a wonderful set of china that had been his grandmother’s and a serving tray to keep it on — and two dolls.

Next Saturday’s sale will include the little log house where his grandmother kept her dolls and a lot of old prints in old frames and rocking chairs and no telling what all.

Shiloh United Church of Christ will serve ham sandwiches in the morning and hot dogs and hamburgers the rest of the day. So, he suggests, bring a lawn chair and come make yourself comfortable.