Want to own a piece of Providence history? City's Goddard family auctioning off treasures
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the location of the Goddard family house. It is 66 Power Street.
A slew of items from a historic Providence family with centuries-old roots in Rhode Island are being auctioned off in the coming days.
A towering red brick home on Power Street once belonged to the family of William Goddard, who launched the city's first newspaper, the Providence Gazette and Country Journal, around 1762. The family's later generations were similarly ambitious. Goddard's son, also named William, was a chancellor and trustee at Brown University who served in the Civil War, at one point on Gen. Ambrose Burnside's staff.
What is available in the auction?
That building held an array of objects from around the globe, from Chippendale furniture to Chinese snuff bottles, French oyster plates and a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk that will cost its buyer no less than $3,200.
Stephen Fletcher, executive vice president of American furniture and decorative arts at auction house Bonhams Skinner, said the family sold off its iconic Townsend and Goddard furniture nearly two decades ago. Those prized pieces were made in Newport with, as the name suggests, another well-known family: the Townsends. If you're wondering just how valuable that furniture was, in 1989, a Goddard desk was sold in New York for $12.1 million, shattering a world record. Previously, the most ever paid for a piece of furniture was $2.97 million for a table used by Marie Antoinette.
"When we entered the scene, you could say, 'Oh, gee, all the good stuff’s gone,'" Fletcher said of his time cataloging items in the old house. "Not true. What was left was is an eclectic assortment of things that have been collected by many generations that remained in that house, some of it from its inception. So the diversity of what we were looking at was, to me, fascinating."
18th-century Dutch clock is the 'crown jewel' of the auction
The collection's crown jewel is an 18th-century Dutch burl walnut clock from Amsterdam. Valued at up to $30,000, the piece is a family treasure.
"It's in a what they call a bombé case, so the base of the case sort of bows out," Fletcher said. "It has this wonderful shape, and it's veneered with burl veneers and inlaid designs ... And the dial itself is a silvered and brass style. It's called an astrological dial, so it shows phases of the moon [and] the date in the arch of the dial."
The clock doesn't just tell time — the chimes play a series of tunes based on the listener's request. As Fletcher put it, it's an old school juke box.
The auction is underway online and concludes on Wednesday, April 5.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI's Goddard family auctioning off thousands of antiques. How to bid.
