Two flower bouquets and a bottle of champagne were waiting for Jane Slater when she arrived at Over South Antiques for its final days this weekend. After 40 years, the small but well-loved shop at the entrance to Menemsha Harbor welcomed its last visitors on Sunday.
On Saturday morning, Mrs. Slater sat behind the counter, nearly obscured by the sunflowers and lilies left by her adoring customers that morning. New visitors came and went through the open door, along with the occasional hummingbird that Mrs. Slater shooed away with a laugh.
“I’ll have to take these flowers outside,” she said.
With a half-price sale underway, the shop’s inventory of china, glass, books, paintings and other items had thinned out considerably by the weekend, but the remaining items still evoked fascination and fond memories among customers.
“I remember drinking Coca Cola out of bottles like this, and they tasted like heaven,” said one customer, holding up an old bottle that bore the mark of a former bottling plant in Vineyard Haven. “Feel how heavy that is!”
A number of old paintings still hung on the white pegboard walls behind the counter, including one by Island folk artist John Ivory, whose work Mrs. Slater has helped to promote over the years, and other seascapes. “I am the last surviving member of the John Ivory society,” she said of the local committee set up to protect and confirm the artist’s work. “We did a lot with John Ivory, and I think we made a name.”
Other local artists to share the walls have included the American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, who rented a house from Mrs. Slater’s parents in Chilmark long ago, and Adolph Dehn, a contemporary of Mr. Benton’s whose work has been featured at the shop.
Some old wooden oars, a box of cleats, and the images of long-deceased fishing boats were right at home in the small shop, which occupied Chilmark’s last remaining net shed (there were five originally), where fishermen stored their nets in the days of trap-fishing off the beach.
“They used to pull the nets out and dry them out on the side of the hill,” Ms. Slater said, pointing through the doorway at a sloping lawn across the street. That explains the wide windows, she said, noting that they were once doorways.
Little has changed here since the 1970s, when Mrs. Slater first rented part of the building for her business. “It’s busier and the cars go faster, but there have been businesses along this strip ever since I’ve been here,” she said, gazing out through the doorway. “Zoning keeps Menemsha pretty much the same.”
And things will remain largely the same, even without Over South to greet people to the village. Mrs. Slater has rented the building to fellow antiques collector Douglas Seward, who plans to open a shop of his own next year. She declined to divulge the name, but encouraged people to visit in the spring.
Mrs. Slater’s entry into the world of antiques came when she and her mother attended a swap meet organized by the Chilmark Community Church many years ago. They quickly saw an opportunity. “We went home and got our card table, and went back and joined them,” Mrs. Slater said. “And after that I learned the business.”
For the first 30 years, she and her late husband, Herbert Slater, sought out material at the Brimfield antique shows and elsewhere. But eventually, as Over South became an institution in its own right, the antiques came to them. Advertising was never much of a concern, Mrs. Slater added, although she did run some early ads in the Gazette.
From May to October each year, she and her husband kept the shop open seven days a week and seldom missed a day. Herb Slater died in November 2014.
“He was my helper and partner,” Mrs. Slater said. “That’s part of why I figured 40 years was enough. It was more fun with him.”
With her days in antiques now at an end, Mrs. Slater will perhaps ironically be spending just as much time “over south” (an expression for the part of Chilmark inland and over the hill from Menemsha), as she plans to continue serving on the town historical commission and parks and recreation committee at the town hall. Both her mother and grandfather worked for the town, she said, so she sees it as a family tradition. She was also recently appointed to the Martha’s Vineyard Museum collection committee, which among other things reviews the museum’s purchase of objects and archival materials.
It was a quiet end to a long journey this weekend, with Mrs. Slater enjoying the flowers and chatting with new visitors. She looked forward to a similarly low-key celebration at Linda Jean’s in Oak Bluffs after closing on Sunday. “I have no plans,” she said of the immediate future. “I’m just going on with my life. I like being in Chilmark.”
“It’s not a bad thing,” she assured some customers who lamented the shop’s closing this weekend. “I’m happy. And somebody who’s really good is going to rent it and do art and antiques too. So come back next year. It will be the same only different.”
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