ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, June 24, 1996 TAG: 9606240006
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MOUNT JACKSON
SOURCE: |By DONALD P. BAKER THE WASHINGTON POST
ED HEBERLEIN hopes to auction off his collection as an eclectic whole.
When Ed Heberlein was a boy in rural Wisconsin, he accompanied his auctioneer father to farm sales and began collecting ``all kinds of stuff.''
Later, as a traveling salesman in Iowa and Minnesota, he continued to accumulate ``stuff,'' which he eventually assembled into a roadside museum attached to his Tuttle and Spice General Store here in the Shenandoah Valley. Someone from the Smithsonian Institution stopped at the museum a few years ago, according to Heberlein, and proclaimed it ``one of the finest old store museums anywhere.''
Now 81, Heberlein is through collecting. After more than half a century of gathering, and very little disbursing, he must get rid of thousands of everyday articles that he has meticulously catalogued and arranged in 10 shops in a make-believe village attached to the store.
Heberlein's father warned him of the perils of ``collecting junk,'' telling the boy, ``You'll never get rid of it.'' But Ed Heberlein's collection is hardly junk. He says an appraiser for a national restaurant chain valued it at $400,000.
Heberlein believes his collection is far too vast and eclectic to sell piecemeal. So he is hoping to find a single buyer, or at least one buyer for each of the shops, before his lease expires in November. He sold the land, buildings and gift shop - but kept the contents of the museum - four years ago after his wife and business partner, Maxine, who has Alzheimer's disease, went into a nursing home.
``Visiting Ed's museum is like taking a trip back in time,'' said Mike McLaughlin of Laurel, who learned of Heberlein's cache from a friend who once operated a general store.
McLaughlin, who collects old-time movie equipment, bought a mutoscope, a hand-operated device that ``flips'' still pictures to create the illusion of motion. The device had been stored in Heberlein's house, where the overflow from the museum is kept.
``Ed's stuff should be preserved as a museum,'' said McLaughlin, who was so captivated by Heberlein's collection that he is trying to help him find a buyer. McLaughlin has placed an advertisement for Heberlein in a coming issue of the newsletter of the American Museum Association. ``Every piece he picks up has a story.''
The thematic shops, connected by a brick sidewalk, include a general store, a soda fountain, a barbershop, a doctor's office, a tobacconist, a millinery, a pharmacy, a jeweler, a toy store and American Indian artifacts.
In the general store, beneath a sign proclaiming it a ``Wells Fargo and Co. Express'' office, Heberlein pointed to an ornate icebox, with a faucet tap on the front, and said he turned down an offer of $20,000 for it from actor Lee Majors - television's ``Six Million Dollar Man'' - who once lived in the area.
Few of Heberlein's objects are that valuable, however. More typical are unusual items, such as a ``plucked chicken rack,'' a rotating, metal contraption with hooks that once displayed denuded fowl on the sidewalk of a general store in Pennsylvania.
The barbershop, adorned with a red, white and blue glass pole that Heberlein salvaged from a shop in Apalachicola, Fla., features a tall, key-wound wooden clock with advertising signs that rotate every five minutes.
The pharmacy contains a broom-size wooden toothbrush - ``the largest in the world,'' Heberlein said - that came from the Schmidt Drug Store up the road in Woodstock.
Heberlein is vague on dates and times in his own life - he thinks he and his wife moved to Virginia about 15 years ago. But he's hyperbolic in specifics about his lode - everything seems to be the oldest, finest, largest, smallest of its kind. The prized item in the tobacco shop, which is guarded by a lifesize cigar-store Indian, is a five-pound pig's bladder - Heberlein swears that's not hogwash - filled with a pound of snuff and a label indicating that it was packed in 1902.
The overflowing Crazy Horse Toy Store houses a 1911 Texas Centennial Doll; musical instruments, buggies, planes, trains, cars, taxis and fire engines gathered from the Syracuse Street Pharmacy in Buffalo; and one of the earliest artificial Christmas trees - there he goes again - whose branches are made of dyed chicken feathers, imported from Germany in 1877.
When they retired in 1990, Ed and Maxine turned the operation over to their son, but he wasn't cut out for the business, so they sold the land and buildings to the company that operates Skyline Caverns. The new owners said they were not interested in buying the museum material, which the Heberleins offered to them for $250,000. But the company is paying rent to the Heberleins for the museum property so its customers can tour it at least until November, when the lease expires.
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: The Washington Post. Ed Heberlein, owner of 10 ``shops''by CNBin a make-believe village attached to his Tuttle and Spice General
Store in New Market, tends to the antiques in his drug store.