Tristram Bampfylde Freeman established the Philadelphia auction
house that has borne his and his descendants' names for two
centuries.
From the rooms at the Merchant's Coffee House at Second and
Chestnut Streets Freeman's moved to Market Street, to Walnut Street
and, in 1924, back to Chestnut Street where the auction house
remains a large presence.
Freeman's has come along way since its early days in the coffee
house, but today its Philadelphia roots are stronger than ever.
More importantly, it is still a Freeman who is in charge.
Beau Freeman (Samuel M. Freeman II) is the sixth-generation
Freeman to run the auction house. While celebrating the company's
200th year, Mr Freeman observes his 46th year at the auction
house, nearly one quarter of its existence. Of his childhood in
an auction family, he says mildly, "I was not inculcated into the
regime." Perhaps it was the lack of early training that helped
form what is truly an impressive career. Mr Freeman followed his
father, Samuel T. Freeman, into the family business in 1958. When
his cousin, Addison B. Freeman Jr, known as "B," died in an air
crash in 1960, Beau Freeman, an uncle and another cousin bought
the business from B's estate.
For its first 150 years, Freeman's was primarily a real estate
and industrial auctioneer, selling land and the contents of the
ships that traded in Philadelphia. Early on, the auction house
sold off entire schooners and their contents, from the topsail
down to the keel.
An early record was achieved in the 1880s for the sale of the
Philadelphia Post Office building for the amazing sum of
$425,000, a record for a piece of real estate at auction.
Although it is a Philadelphia auction house, it was in Boston
that Freeman's effected its greatest coup. During World War I,
the US government commandeered the entire American wool clip for
the cellulose that was used to make gunpowder. But, by 1919,
there was wool aplenty and Freeman's was summoned to sell it. One
sale alone reaped $17 million; other sales brought the overall
total to $350 million for the year - a staggering accounting in
those days. It was the Boston wool that made Freeman's a national
force to be reckoned with. The auction house acquired the J.E.
Conant Company, a Lowell and Boston auction house involved
primarily in New England textile business, in 1920. It maintained
a Boston presence for the next 40 years until after the death of
Addison B. Jr.
Another war-related coup was the sale in 1922 of the gunpowder
industry of Nitro, W.Va., around which the boomtown had been
founded. That sale was the largest in the company history.
After World War I, when the Treaty of Versailles decreed that all
nations should reduce their military forces to the lowest levels
possible, Freeman's came to the fore. The firm auctioned off four
battleships in Philadelphia and Boston in 1924.
Throughout the Depression Freeman's sold off mill after mill in
the Philadelphia and Boston areas as the textile and other
industries moved south. Like most other auction houses across the
country, Freeman's was primarily an industrial seller.
After a concatenation of events, the 1682 Charter of Libertie
from King Charles to William Penn setting out the liberties and
laws that would govern the young Commonwealth ended up in a
private English collection. It subsequently went to a London
bookseller, who sent it to auction at Freeman's, where in 1923 it
was the star of the first major sale in the new gallery at 1808
Chestnut Street. The city politicians failed to raise the finds
to acquire it and it sold to a New York collector. An outcry
ensued and the citizens of Philadelphia raised the $25,000 to
bring it back to Philadelphia. The document's return in 1924 was
welcomed in a grand celebration on Christmas Eve at which
conductor Leopold Stokowski led the Philadelphia Orchestra at
Philadelphia City Hall. The document is now in the state archives
at Harrisburg.
During the 1940s, when grand old estates were falling at auction,
Freeman's helped disperse the collection of Edward T.
Stokesbury's Whitemarsh Hall, a 147-room home that French
statesman Georges Clemenceau visited and described as the
"Versailles of America."
When Freeman's was summoned to auction off the contents of the
venerable Leary's bookstore in Philadelphia in 1969, a broadside
of the Declaration of Independence printed by John Dunlap turned
up folded inside a scrapbook. Texas collectors Ira G. Corn Jr and
Joseph P. Driscoll paid $404,000 for it at Freeman's on May 7,
1969, and donated it to the Dallas Public Library, where it is
available to view.
Another Philadelphia treasure to cross the Freeman block was
Benjamin Franklin's handsomely executed kneehole desk that sold
for $40,000 in October 1962 to Independence National Park. It
came from Franklin's descendents.
Freeman's history is replete with records that are interwoven in
the fabric of the city it serves. For some, however, the more
interesting stories concern the more unusual, if not
extraordinary, objects the house has sold.
One of the more notable was the Eighteenth Century Turkish chess
automaton designed by self-styled baron Wolfgang von Kempelen.
One of the most notorious illusions ever, "The Turk," as the
device was known, was a chess-playing automaton that defeated
such lights as Frederick the Great and Napoleon. The automaton
was a wonder across Europe and arrived in the United States in
1826 to great acclaim. After the craze subsided, the piece turned
up at Freeman's and was inspected carefully before going on the
block. It was revealed as a fraud. A door at the rear of the
automaton allowed a man to enter and manipulate the machine by
magnets beneath the playing board. It sold at Freeman's in 1838
for a mere $400 to a buyer who sold shares in the device. It
ended up at the Chinese Museum in Philadelphia where it was
destroyed in a fire in 1854.
In 1927, Freeman's sold off the remainders from the 1926
Sesquicentennial International Exposition conducted in
Philadelphia. Among the more memorable icons of the fair was the
80-foot-tall replica of the Liberty Bell, beneath which vehicular
and pedestrian traffic passed to enter the fair. It was a
decidedly striking gateway that was wrought from sheet metal and
covered with nearly 26,000 15-watt light bulbs - including the
clapper.
Freeman's achieved a record in 1997 for a fine pair of
Philadelphia porcelain urns made by William Ellis Tucker in about
1833 when they drew $291,500 from a private collector. In 2004,
"The Old Mill, Washington's Crossing" by Pennsylvania artist
Edward Wallis Redfield was a record at $625,000, plus premium.
Beau Freeman also fondly recalls the sale of a bronze cast by
Alexander Calder of William Penn's finger from the statue that
tops Philadelphia City Hall that he said brought around $6,000 or
$7,000.
He also remembers the 1972 sale of the Affleck chest-on-chest,
now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for what was at the time a
daunting price of $94,000.
Under Beau Freeman's tutelage, his family's auction house
achieved impressive prices for equally impressive objects of art
and history. He demurs saying that the market in the late 1960s
and 1970s presented opportunities that allowed most auction
houses to concentrate on art and antiques. Freeman's was no
exception.
A John Dunlap print of the Declaration of Independence was
found folded inside a scrapbook at Leary's bookstore in 1969
and sold at Freeman's for $404,000. It is on view at the Dallas
Public Library.
Beau Freeman has been busy keeping his company competitive.
In 1988, the company merged with Philadelphia Fine Arts and became
Freeman Fine Arts. The name reverted to Samuel T. Freeman when a
principal of Fine Arts retired. Son Jonathan Freeman is currently
the manager of client services and represents the seventh
generation at the auction house.
In 1999, Freeman's expanded across the Atlantic as it formed a
partnership with Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh. Paul Roberts,
former deputy chairman of Lyon & Turnbull, is president of
Samuel T. Freeman.
Bicentennial celebrations began in November with the launch of
the Ed Bacon Foundation that was established to support the
legacy that the Philadelphia city planner extraordinaire exerted
on the city from 1949 to 1970. The celebrations conclude in
November 2005 with a gala that will benefit the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, another Philadelphia institution that
is celebrating its 200th anniversary. Freeman's is a benefactor
of the academy and since 2000 has conducted an annual sale to
benefit the Samuel T. Freeman Memorial Scholarship and Endowment
Fund that it established at the academy.
An anniversary auction of Pennsylvania furniture, folk art,
ceramics and glass, paper and Twentieth Century pieces is planned
for November to commemorate the founding of the auction house.
The Pennsylvania sale will be an annual event.
A must-have new book by Roland Arkell and Catherine
Saunders-Watson detailing Freeman's remarkable history, The
Other Philadelphia Story: Stories from within the Walls of
America's Oldest Auction House will be released in May. The
192-page volume is published to coincide with the 200th
anniversary by Antique Collectors' Club and was underwritten by
Freeman's.
For information, 215-563-9275.
