The Lamoille County Antique Show, held in late May in the main 4-H barn at the Lamoille County Field Days grounds in Johnson, Vermont, opened to the public at nine on the morning of May 16, 2026.
Seventy-two dealers had set up the night before. The barn — built in 1957, with a poured concrete floor and a high pitched roof of corrugated steel — holds the show in two long aisles separated by a centre table of refreshments staffed by the Johnson Lions Club.
The show has been running, in this barn, since 1982. The same dealers, or their successors, return each year. The same buyers come up from the Burlington area, and a smaller contingent down from St. Johnsbury. The trade is unmistakably local.
Admission was five dollars at the door, paid to a woman seated at a card table near the main barn entrance. Coffee from the Lions Club was a dollar fifty in a Styrofoam cup. A homemade doughnut was a dollar.
The merchandise was what one would expect from a county fair in northern Vermont: Americana of the kind that has come out of the houses of central New England for two centuries. Painted blanket chests, treen, hooked rugs, stoneware crocks, pewter, brass kettles, the occasional small piece of folk art, hundreds of small books.
A dealer from Stowe had set up the largest single booth, taking three tables along the south wall. He specialised in 19th-century painted furniture — a yellow-painted Hepplewhite chest of drawers, a green-painted blanket chest with a tulip motif on the front panel, a small red painted candle box.
The yellow chest, asking nine hundred and seventy-five dollars, had the original surface, slightly worn at the corners, with no later overpaint. A Pewter correspondent examined it carefully. The drawer joinery was consistent, the bottom boards original, the brasses replaced but in a sympathetic style. The piece sold by ten-thirty, to a dealer from Hudson, New York.
Beatrix Joost, on assignment for this magazine, spent the first hour of the show speaking with the dealer at the third table on the east aisle, a woman named Helen Cushing who had been doing the Lamoille show since 1996. Cushing dealt almost exclusively in 19th-century New England pewter and treen.
She had brought sixty-two pieces. By ten she had sold eleven of them, mostly small treen items, to dealers from out of state. Her best piece — a William Will porringer with the eagle touch, from his Philadelphia period — remained at the back of her table at two hundred and sixty dollars.
Cushing's prices are characteristic of a county fair of this kind. They are higher than a flea market, lower than a Brimfield or a Bermondsey, considerably lower than a New York shop or auction. The Lamoille show is one of the markets where a serious collector can still buy good American pewter at prices that reflect regional supply.
The buyers at the Lamoille show fall into two groups. The first are local — people from Morrisville and Cambridge and Johnson who have come for a Saturday outing, who buy a small piece of pottery or a hooked rug, who eat a doughnut and leave by eleven.
The second are out-of-state dealers, perhaps a dozen of them, who drive up from Connecticut and New York and Massachusetts, who walk the show in the first hour with intent, who buy ten or twelve pieces between them, who pay in cash, who load their station wagons in the parking lot, and who are gone by noon.
The two groups barely interact. They are looking at different objects with different eyes. A Connecticut dealer paid a hundred and twenty dollars for a small painted document box at nine-fifteen and could have sold it in his Litchfield shop for four hundred and fifty by the following Wednesday.
Local collectors are not unaware of the markup. A retired teacher from Morrisville, who had been collecting Vermont stoneware for thirty years, told a Pewter correspondent that he had stopped buying at the show because the out-of-state dealers always got there first. He came now for the doughnuts and the conversation.
This is the recurring dynamic of a county antique fair in 2026. The local supply has not changed much in thirty years. The pricing in the major markets has risen sharply. The differential has drawn dealers from further afield. The local collectors, who supported the show in the first place, find themselves priced out.
The dealers are aware of this. Some, including Cushing, deliberately price their best pieces low enough that a local buyer can still afford them. Cushing held back two of her better pieces from the morning rush and offered them only to repeat local customers in the afternoon. One sold by two.
The food is provided, by long custom, by the Lions Club. The proceeds go to the Lamoille County 4-H program. The coffee runs out by one, the doughnuts by eleven-thirty. The show closes at four.
A Pewter correspondent bought one piece: a small turned-maple treen salt cellar, late 18th century, from Cushing's table, twenty-two dollars, with no maker's mark and no provenance beyond Cushing's own account of buying it from an estate in Hyde Park, Vermont, in 2019.
The drive from the Lamoille fairgrounds back to Burlington takes about forty minutes along Route 15, through the small towns of Cambridge and Underhill, with the western face of Mount Mansfield rising on the left.
A serious collector who has time for only one Vermont show in a year should consider Lamoille. It is smaller than the Wilmington antique fair, more focused than the larger spring shows in Quechee, less hurried than anything held closer to Burlington. The 4-H barn is a working space and the show within it is a working market.
The dealers will be back next May. The same coffee will be sold by the same volunteers from the same Lions Club. A reader of this magazine making a first visit should arrive at nine, walk the aisles twice, and buy nothing until the second pass.