‘Unused’ 100-year-old coffins up for auction
Two coffins dating back to the early 1900s will be sold at auction Saturday.
Two coffins dating back to the early 1900s will be sold at auction Saturday.
Some projects never do get finished. Such was the fate of two coffins made, but not completed, around the early 1900s.
They will be auctioned off at the Clayton Auction Center in Waynesburg Saturday. The coffins are advertised as “unused,” alongside window air conditioners, an oak bedroom set and a 32-inch flatscreen TV.
“In this business, you’re liable to run across almost anything,” said auctioneer James Clayton.
The coffins never reached their final purpose, but were stored in the Dye General Store in Jollytown for decades.
“They aren’t very fancy, but they are what they are,” he said.
He bought them from Robert Rice, whose wife inherited the store from her father.
“My wife ran the store. I was the livestock farmer,” Rice said.
His wife’s grandfather, Jefferson Dye, was the man who made the coffins. He was an undertaker and worked with a cabinetmaker across the street from the general store.
He said he does not know exactly what year they were made. But they were made no later than 1910, he said, because Dye died in 1911.
Rice said the family never had an estate sale or sold old items after the store closed. He found safes, a McCaskey cash register and a string holder.
“They didn’t have any plastic bags or anything,” he said. “They used a paper bag and tied it with a string.”
As locals went about their daily business in the store, the coffins lay upstairs.
Normally, coffins of the time were covered with black cloth or painted with varnish, he said. But these coffins did not make it to that point.
“They were something he was supposed to finish, but never did,” Rice said.