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Cast-iron seat sale draws collectors to Washington
WASHINGTON — The year is 1860-something.
An unforgiving sun bears down with unseasonably sweltering heat and insufferable humidity, even early in the morning, for settlers on unincorporated land somewhere in the Midwest. It’s a redundant and unwelcome reminder to the region’s farmers that everything they own and do, including an honest day’s work, is at Mother Nature’s mercy.
Already nagged by flies, unruly animals and unenthusiastic sons brought to help in the field, one grower brings his plow out of a shed; it’s horse-pulled, tractors won’t exist for another 30 years. He voices a burst of profanity when he discovers the metal seat was somehow damaged since its last use, rendering the equipment useless. Frustrated by the finding, he heads into town, where a blacksmith presents him with a replacement from Peru City Plow Works.
The man buys the dense specimen of metalwork in exchange for much of his personal savings, then hauls it back to the farm, fixes it to the plow, and gets to work several hours behind schedule. He resolves to take better care of the seat this time, so as not to waste the investment.
Over 150 years go by.
On March 23, 2024, the seat sells for a whopping $2,500 in an auction at the Washington County Fairgrounds, where bidders recognize it as one of only five or six of its model still known to exist. The buyer, a man named Brian Elliott, traveled 16 hours one-way for a chance to own the artifact.
“A seat with all the lettering, and no repairs or damage, it’s pretty hard to come by,” said Elliott, still ecstatic about his purchase. “I drove all the way from South Carolina and had this one on my mind. I wasn’t about to leave without it.”
Antique farm instruments can fetch thousands
The Peru City Plow seat came from the collection of Ron Van Halst, a Canadian man who collected the implements across North America for about 30 years, but recently decided to sell most of them off as he and his wife downsize their home.
With hundreds of items on display, he was one of two vendors supplying Saturday’s sale. Such auctions are almost always fueled by collectors in similar circumstances, releasing their finds back into the ecosystem of buyers and sellers.
“At my age, I just think it’s time to start divesting myself of possessions,” said Van Halst, who is 86. “I knew it had to come sooner or later. When I had 70-some odd seats in the basement, and 260 or 270 stacked in a garage in special shelving that we had built … it was just time to clean up.”
Some hobbyists buy damaged seats and repair them, while others covet only the most genuine relics of a carefully preserved age. A few seek sheer volume for their own collections, while their peers hunt down only the rarest finds wherever they turn up, fascinated by the chance to own something so uncommon, you could count the number of intact copies on one hand.
Not every seat in Saturday’s sale was so glamorous, of course.
Most sold for $5-$25, known as “plain seats” for their lack of ornate designs, carefully crafted lettering, or visible branding. One buyer at the sale was even heckled into a starting bid of $10 for one piece, when the auctioneer declared, “I know you need a new bar stool.”
The low price point offers an enticing point of entry, however, for newer antique collectors like 13-year-old Ryan Link.
“I went to my first auction in Ohio, about a year (or) two years ago,” he said. “I just like the stuff from the old times, things like that. Some of the original seats, just the plain ones, are good.”
The association has each seat graded on a scale of 1-10.5, with higher numbers being rarer. Moving up the scale, they start to go for $50, then $100, then greater sums.
A few seats, painted in a familiar shade of green and bearing the name “Deere” fetched prices of $250 or more, their demand driven up by collectors of the still-iconic brand.
“Just because they’re a Deere, they bring more money,” said Minnesota collector Gordy Traxler, whose wife bought two such seats on behalf of remote buyers, calling in their bids from afar. “It just depends on the name and the rarity. Prices are all over the board.”
Collectors are in it for thrill, camaraderie
The way the collectors talk about their metal antiques resembles the way a scholar would discuss highbrow museum displays, or how a sommelier might describe a fine wine. Their appreciation is evident for every easy-to-miss detail, every square inch that should be scratched, but isn’t.
“It’s ornate, it’s an art form,” said John Thompson, who drove up from South Carolina with Elliott for the auction. “Here’s a Swedish seat. I don’t even know what (the lettering) means, but you can see flowers on it, and the time it took to make it look good.”
Many of those gathered to buy cast-iron items described the hobby as something of a search for treasure, or an “Easter egg hunt.”
There’s no shortage of opportunities for these thrill-seekers: whether from finding valuable cast-iron in unlikely places, or the once-in-a-lifetime chance to hold an especially rare piece, or edging out the competition in a nail-biting auction, collectors can ride a high of anticipation and payoff at every turn.
“It’s like a disease, you get hooked,” said Bob Ferrero, who drove up to Washington from Missouri for the sale. “I’ve got a couple hundred seats, and I’m a lot more particular than I used to be … auctions are the best, because you’ll have a lot of seats, like here, that are hard to find.”
Every collector interviewed by The Union said they valued one thing more than the cast-iron seats themselves: the people bidding on them.
Although competitive auctions can spawn rivalries and bidding wars, collectors make up a tight-knit community, united by their shared, if somewhat obscure passion.
“A friend of mine once said, ‘You come for the hobby, and you stay for the people,’” said Cast Iron Seat Association Vice President Tom Wilson, a Crawfordsville native. “It doesn’t do me any (good) to buy something and take it home if I can’t enjoy the experience with friends … I’ve got a decent-sized collection of stuff, but it’s not the stuff, it’s the relationships. That’s the priceless part.”
Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com
