Scott Swanson
David and Jeanette Jewett have always had an eye for antiques – the “real” ones, David firmly points out.
In fact, they’ve had so much fun over the years spotting and collecting relics of the past that, well, it became obvious they needed to unload some of it. Which is why they opened the Sweet Home Trading Post at 4101 Highway 20 Jan. 1 of this year.
Their enthusiasm for old things comes across as more than just salesmanship. They really love vintage collectibles – and talking about them.
“Our thing is selling real antiques, stuff that’s highly collectible,” said David, 63. “We had to decide early on whether to sell junk or antiques. When people get in here, they’re kind of awed by the quality of antiques we have in here.”
“We’ve had people ask if some of the stuff is for sale, thinking it’s not,” added Jeanette, 61.
What’s also unique about the Jewetts’ enterprise is that this is a return, after a 20-year hiatus, to the antiques business in that location, even though they don’t own the building.
They operated Rainbow’s End, an antiques and Costco liquidation business, there between 1990 and 1995.
“We had antiques on one side of the store and liquidation on the other,” Jeanette said.
Then a lot of other stuff happened, but that’s the rest of the story.
Antiques have been an interest for David since he was “about 12,” he said, but the passion didn’t really take off until he and Jeanette were married and bought an old house in western Washington on property that included an old dump. They started digging up old bottles and David put them in an 8-foot display case in the yard and people started buying them.
“That was fun, finding those old bottles out back,” Jeanette said. “They were not cracked. It was awesome.”
David was working as a logger in those days, then later became a real estate agent.
“But when I’d get a bad disposition selling real estate, I’d go back into logging for an attitude adjustment,” he said, chuckling.
He was logging in Alaska when he got injured and had to quit working in the woods. Soon after, he and Jeanine moved to Sweet Home, in 1990, with their four children.
“The idea originally was to come down here to buy property,” David said. “We ended up with Rainbow’s End and we got consumed by that.”
In 1995 they decided they wanted to travel so they closed up shop, hit the road and worked antiques shows and swap meets around the West.
David specializes in Old West antiques – “I used to be known as the guy who has all the cowboy and Indian stuff.” He’s collected a lot of it from those stops.
The shop has plenty of old leather holsters, gun belts, saddles, hats, Crockett leather and cavalry spurs, and Native American relics that he’s collected over the years in such places as eastern Oregon and Arizona. There’s a bottle from the OK Corral that they located in an antique store in the Southwest.
“This kind of stuff is hard to get,” David said, fingering an old leather lariat. “I’m very picky. I’m always on the hunt.
“I could play cowboys and Indians incessantly,” he added, with a twinkle in his eye.
After a few years on the road, David’s aged father needed care, so they decided to head back to Sweet Home. They settled down but kept collecting while they took care of the elder Jewett, a span that wound up lasting eight years. They stopped going to shows and got involved in Crawfordsville Community Church.
They also had a little problem.
“I was retired. We didn’t have a lot to do. We had lots of barns and outbuildings full of antiques out there and we were still collecting.”
So they decided to open another store and started looking around. They noticed there wasn’t “a lot of (antiques) action going on” Jeanette said.
She said they wanted a place “with a lot of windows” and they noticed that the building that used to house Rainbow’s End didn’t appear to be getting much use.
“I said, ‘Why don’t you go check that place out?’” Jeanette said. Dave did and worked out a deal with owner Brad Newport. They started moving items into the store last fall and opened officially at the beginning of the year.
“I just believe God worked that out,” Don said.
They’d hoped to get some of their children involved – Don and John of Sweet Home, Aileen of Lyons, and Amy, who lives with them, but that hasn’t worked out with any except Amy, 38, who is developmentally disabled and helps out around the store when she’s not working at Sunshine Industries.
The response was almost instantaneous.
“It’s surprising how many people stop in,” Jeanette told a visitor, who witnessed three different sets of customers, all of them from out of town, come into the store within an hour early last Thursday afternoon. “When we opened the store I couldn’t believe how many bottles we sold right out of the chute.”
The visitors tend to be older folks, though the younger generation is starting to get more interested, David said.
“There are four or five shows on TV about antiques, so there’s a little bit of a following,” he said. “The young people have become pickers.”
One popular item is blue graniteware, enameled metal pots and other kitchen items produced from the 1870s until the end of World War II, which they have displayed in the back of the store.
“That’s really hard to come by,” David said. “We’ve collected it for years. When we opened the store, it came right out of the house.”
For him, collecting and selling antiques is “history and I just like history.”
“There’s kind of an element of delayed gratification too. You learn to be patient.
“We live in an instant, throwaway society, where we have to have everything instantaneously.
“Antiques are kind of delayed. You don’t get to buy everything at once.
“It’s like a treasure hunt.”