Autumn is the season for country auctions, and in the upper Piedmont, that means a trip to Tillett’s Auction Barn on Belmont Ridge Road, just north of Mount Hope Church. Bill Tillett has been auctioneering since fall 1963, after he graduated from the Superior School of Auctioneering in Decatur, Ill.
With his ruddy face and broad-brimmed hat, Tillett, who is more than six feet tall and has a discus thrower’s build, is a commanding presence among the masses that often surround him.
“Ask him about the anvils,” an onlooker suggested.
Tillett told me that, at the old agricultural shop at Loudoun County High School, he, along with a few other teens, could heft a 100-plus-pound anvil over his head.
Tillett had been going to auctions since the late 1930s, then in tow with his father, Christopher, taking a break after a day’s work on the family dairy farm. Today’s auction barn stands on that land.
“It was all rural people then,” Tillett said. “They could find a use for just about anything they bought.”
How did he feel the first time he ran an auction?
“It was at the Aldie firehouse. When you got up before the public like that, and you’re looking for a place to hide, there’s no place to hide. There were no mikes then. Roger Powell, the Loudoun sheriff, a good friend of the family, he got up there to give me a break.”
Auctions through the 1970s were nearly always announced as public sales, and the names of the people selling items typically appeared in newspaper ads and on handbills tacked on the doors of country stores. For the Tilletts and their neighbors, it was the Waxpool store, run by Bill Tillett’s grandfather Samuel Edgar Munday.
At a public sale, usually held before a family moved or after a death, people often bid on an item because they wanted to buy a keepsake of someone they once knew. It was a way of having a tangible remembrance and a link between generations.
Tillett ran public estate sales from the Shenandoah Valley east into Fairfax County and south into Fauquier for 16 years, before deciding that he wanted to own an auction house. His 130-foot-long cinder-block building on Belmont Ridge Road in Ashburn opened in April 1980.
The area was still rural, and Tillett recalled that on Saturdays, “you’d start the sale at 10. They’d bring their lunch, make a day out of it. There wouldn’t be room for anybody to park. They wouldn’t leave until the last item was sold. Now, they don’t stay the way they used to. When they play out, we play out.”
Before the Ashburn area became developed, Tillett knew people by their names. Now, bidders use cards with numbers and register by showing a driver’s license before getting a card.
“That started in the early 1980s,” Tillett said. “A guy just walked off [without paying], and he was a D.C. policeman.”
At a recent auction, Tillett hefted larger items above his head before he started the bidding. Other items were in boxes or on tables. He quickly decided to sell some items in lots, or by twos and threes. When the bids started, Bryan Damewood, the bid spotter, held up the items as Tillett pointed to the successive bidders. Damewood urged on bidders with half-cries of “Yes, yes.” He looked about to see whether Tillett had missed anybody.
Bids go up by 50 cents. At auctioneering school, Tillett said, he had to patter to 100, back and forth at 50-cent intervals. “99.50, 99, 98.50. We sometimes raised a bid by a quarter before the ’90s.”
Two handmade cane-bottom chairs were up for bid.
“They need work,” Tillett warned potential buyers.
They sold for $5. A clerk recorded the buyer’s number. Fixed up, they’d sell for $100 each, I reckoned.
Linda, from Manassas, bought a set of pink, green and yellow German china. “Ninety dollars, and it’s just got a teacup missing,” she said, as I carried the set to her car trunk. “Ten, 20 years ago I was an auction groupie,” she said. “Went one, two, three times a week with my kids.”
In her trunk were some pictures in frames and a small pile of tchotchkes. She gave me a knowing look and said, quietly, “I got those earlier.”
Maybe she’s not cured yet.
