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 andChestnut Streets Freeman’s moved to Market Street, to Walnut Streetand, in 1924, back to Chestnut Street where the auction houseremains 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 becameFreeman Fine Arts. The name reverted to Samuel T. Freeman when aprincipal of Fine Arts retired. Son Jonathan Freeman is currentlythe manager of client services and represents the seventhgeneration 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.