The Faces Of Brimfield

This collage of photographs of Gordon Reid in action at Auction Acres was compiled from photographs taken during the 1960s. —Courtesy Judy Mathieu and Jill Lukesh

The 1793 house that Moriarty bought in Brimfield in 1965 and restored over four decades with his wife, Pam, is ringed by tidy flower beds. The vast lawn tumbles down a long hill to a large pond awash with water lilies.

Beyond this idyllic spot is the 17-acre parcel where, three times a year in May, July and September, the Moriaritys stage their 25-year-old Heart-O-The-Mart antiques show. Like their neighbors, Judy and Jake Mathieu and Jeanne Hertan, the Moriaritys are among 23 licensed owner/operators who collectively produce Brimfield, the hurly-burly flea market known the antiques-world over as the greatest show on earth.

Eighteen days a year, the Brimfield markets attract 30,000 to 50,000 shoppers daily. The other 347 days, Brimfield, a 270-year-old hamlet with a population of about 3,400, sinks back into its sleepy past, devoid of the tourist amenities that have transformed its neighbor Sturbridge, Mass. Circling the town's oblong green are a couple of churches, a post office, a town hall, a library and a pizza parlor. Blink, and you'll miss Brimfield.

Sixty-seven exhibitors participated in the first Reid market at Auction Acres in September 1959. The swap meet drew 300 buyers. Although it is not known what year this photograph was taken, it shows Brimfield during “sleepier” days when the Auction Acres field was the only game in town. The house on the triangular lot, left center, was razed and is now May’s parking lot; the farmland, upper left, is now May’s display field and the area across the street from Auction Acres, Shelton’s, opened in 1975.

Don and Pam Moriarity began dabbling in antiques in 1967; that year, the couple paid $17 for a space in Gordon Reid's Famous Flea Market. Along with their husbands, children and grandchildren, Gordon's daughters — Judy Mathieu and Jill Lukesh, universally known as "the girls" — continue the family business, now called J&J Promotions.

"He'd be as proud as a peacock," Judy says of her father, who died in 1974 before his show ballooned into six intensive days of trading that extend, tented field to tented field, for a mile along Route 20.

Judy and her husband, Jake, live in the 1823 farmhouse, now on 40 acres, that Gordon and Madelyn Reid bought in 1946. Judy and her two siblings grew up around antiques, setting up chairs and working as runners at their father's auctions for as long as they can remember.

Their grandfather, Robert M. Reid, conducted his first auction in 1907. By 1913, he had offices in Hartford and Manchester, Conn. Helped out by his sons, Gordon and Ray, Bob Reid conducted as many as 200 auctions a year, many of them farm sales, at his 600-seat Auctiontorium in Bolton, Conn.