Somewhere between fantasy and reality lies the truth of family stories
Our "Antiques Roadshow" finds weren't worth any money, but that's not the point
After a thorough inventory of all our readily accessible old stuff, my Mom and I landed on the items we’d bring to the taping of “Antiques Roadshow.” We scored tickets for the day-long shoot at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay last summer, the first time in its 30 seasons the show had ever been to Maine - a fact I find incredible, given how old so many things in this state are (houses, infrastructure, people).
Wrapped in towels and tucked in Hannaford bags in the back of my Kia Soul were two framed Chinese floral prints, an old table clock, and a wooden plaque with a tiny iron pistol, a powder flask and some bullet molds bolted to it. My Mom said my grandfather said the pistol was from the Revolutionary War. The prints were given to my cousin at his wedding by another cousin. The clock was heavy and broken.
You often see people on “Roadshow” touting the provenance of their items - we’re pretty sure this lamp is Tiffany, a famous artist who grew up next to my mom gave her this painting, I got this signed bat from a baseball legend when I was seven years old, and so on. If the provenance isn’t there or can’t be at least partially verified, you’ve probably just got a cool thing that’s not worth much money - or, worse, your family stories are not only inaccurate, but are likely entirely made up.
On the ride down to Boothbay from Bangor, my Mom and I and our road trip buddies - my mother in law, Marta, and my former coworker, Judy, who was like a mom to me when we worked at the Bangor Daily News together - shared all kinds of family stories.
The pistol we brought had hung on our living room wall for decades, and before that was in the den at my grandparents’ house in Belfast. Our ancestor, Joshua Treat, was an early white settler in the 18th century along the Penobscot River, and eventually became the armorer at what is now Fort Point in Stockton Springs. The pistol belonged to him, the story goes; perhaps he even made it himself. Maybe he shot at British sailors with it during the (disastrous) Penobscot Expedition in 1779, during the Revolutionary War. Cool, right? So cool.
Another Treat family story concerns an infamous local legend. Joshua Treat, who we believed owned the pistol that was rattling around in the back of my car, had a son that married Lydia Buck, the daughter of Jonathan Buck. Jonathan Buck was the founder of the town of Bucksport, and the legend holds he put an alleged “witch” to death by burning her at the stake. The woman - understandably upset that she was going to die in a fire - cursed Buck, saying that his grave would always bear the mark of his having murdered a woman. The monument that lays atop Buck’s grave to this day has a discoloration that can’t be removed, which people take to mean the curse is real. We’re related to him somehow. Cool, right? So cool.
Then there’s Marion “Minnie” Hubbard Treat, another ancestor who married George McKay, a wealthy inventor 36 years her senior. She left podunk Frankfort for a glamorous life in Europe - we imagined her living the life of a glamorous socialite, like you see on “The Gilded Age.” She supposedly had an affair with Victor Emmanuel III, the King of Italy (and enabler of fascist Benito Mussolini), who was the real father of the two sons people believed were McKay’s. Scandalous!
One time, when I was six or seven years old, my Aunt Anne showed me a little box containing a strip of black velveteen fabric, accompanied by an old piece of paper with spindly cursive writing on it that read something like “This was cut from the stretcher that carried Abraham Lincoln out of Ford’s Theatre.” I remember touching the fabric and thinking somebody very famous died on it. I never saw or heard about the fabric ever again, but I never forgot about it.
After lunch at Moody’s Diner - milkshakes, western sandwiches, molasses donuts to go - we arrived in Boothbay in time for our entry slot for the taping. It had been raining on and off all day, and we dutifully stood in line to get checked in and get our objects sorted. It was a cheerful bunch assembled. Nobody seemed to hold out much hope that they were in possession of that $100,000 item that closes out the episode, but they were happy to stand in the drizzle and chit chat. Very congenial. Very Maine.
I spotted the delightful Kevin Zavian taping an appraisal - maybe you’ll see me smiling like a doofus in the background, when the Maine episodes air this month. I didn’t find Nico Lowry, sadly. The line for the paintings, prints and posters tent was simply too long for me to get close and compliment him on his sartorial flair.
A nice lady at a table in the visitor center told us which booths to hit up for each of our items, and after wandering the garden grounds for a while, we made our way to our first booth: Arms & Militaria.
The appraiser looked up and down at our tiny little gun and quickly made an assessment. None of the three items displayed on the plaque - the gun, the flask and the molds - were from the same time period. The gun he suspected was made by famed Massachusetts armsmaker Ethan Allen, and dated from the 1840s or 50s - old, sure, but nothing particularly rare. The bullet molds he thought looked like they came from World War I or II. The powder flask? No clue. All three items were unrelated to one another, and none of them came from the Revolutionary War.
What else isn’t true? Is any of it true? What everyday accomplishments have been inflated to heroic proportions? What minor scandals have been spiced up? What somewhat unremarkable stories have been exaggerated into lurid tales of murder and witchcraft? All that glitters, as they say, is not gold.
Marion Hubbard Treat likely did have an affair with an Italian guy, but not with the King of Italy - and anyway, she and George McKay got divorced, she remarried and divorced again, and then she lived out the rest of her days as a wealthy divorcee in New York City. The fabric from the stretcher that carried a mortally wounded Abraham Lincoln out of Ford Theatre? It’s got to be fake. Maybe I imagined it. Regardless, it’s lost to history now.
The legends of the witch that cursed Jonathan Buck are not only not true - they’re not even possible, given that witch trials in North America ended more than a century before the “execution” took place in the 1780s. Personally, I am comforted by this. I’m already deeply uncomfortable with the idea of being a distant descendent of top-level colonizers. I don’t want to add a misogynist murderer to that list of bad stuff in our family’s past.
We scurried back to the car and returned our items to the trunk. My mother in law’s pretty little piece of pottery was nice, the beautiful Suzanne Perrault said, but it was worth perhaps $20. The clock didn’t even make it out of the car – too heavy, too broken, not worth it. We didn’t have time to get the Chinese prints appraised - by the time we got through the other lines, it was getting pretty late and everyone was tired.
On the drive home to Bangor, as we whizzed down windy back roads, through impossibly green swaths of farmland and forest and into pockets of thick coastal mist, I thought about the stories we tell ourselves and others. I’m terrible at math, but I view it as an equation: The longer the length in time between the actual event and the present, the wider the gaps in truth become. We fill those gaps with whatever preoccupies us: fame, money, glamor, heroism, religion, bigotry, insecurity, laughter, love. We must sort reality out from fantasy, of course. But our true natures - who we really are, and why we and the people that came before us are that way - lies somewhere in between.
The Maine episodes of “Antiques Roadshow” air on Maine Public at 8 p.m. on Feb. 16 and 23 and March 2.