Jeff

You’d like Jeff. He has an easy smile and is the kind of person that remembers your name.

He is a country store historian and preservationist with a large collection of country store artifacts. His personal collection was the featured exhibit “Old County Store” at the Red Wing Pottery Museum.

I can imagine that Jeff would have been a popular country storeowner. He is easy to talk to and generous with his time. When I asked him how he got started collecting he recalled an aunt and uncle that collected Victorian pattern glassware and an aunt who worked at the Gluek office and had a large collection of cans. He credits her for his appreciation of the art of advertising and his interest in old wood boxes (with colorful advertising labels).

Jeff has been photographing and documenting all the wood boxes in his collection and plans to write a book, complete with history and photographs, including the care and preservation of these early advertising artifacts from the 1870’s to World War II.

He continued to share stories and told me of a trip to Florida when he was about 10. He traveled with his family to visit an aunt and uncle during the Daytona 500. His dad and uncle went to the race but Jeff wasn’t interested, he preferred to go with the ladies to the Ponce de Leon Lighthouse inlet. He enjoyed seeing the lighthouse and spotting jellyfish and snakes before continuing on to explore a kind of prehistoric trash dump of discarded materials to dig for treasure. Jeff remembers finding 2 glass bottles there dating back to the 1800’s. He told me he still had one of the bottles he found that day, so I asked to see it. It is featured in this painting.

Oil on cradled wood panel