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ONE MAN’S PASSION FOR TOOLS
Alan Sellers loved tools!
Born on the 17th of June,
1920 in Atlanta, he was
the youngest of three brothers and his father worked for the railroad.
He married the daughter of a railroad engineer, Louise Smith. During
World War II, Alan served in the Army Air Force. Afterwards, he went to
work in Nashville. Louise and Alan, accompanied by their two young
daughters, Sue and April, subsequently moved to Marietta. In the early
nineteen-fifties, Alan and Louise Sellars started a retail hardware
business.
They opened a
hardware store with a gift shop near their home in Marietta. During
that first decade in Marietta, Alan and Louise also began an activity
that would become a passion — they began to spend many long weekends
traveling and visiting antique stores. In the process,they learned
about and acquired a variety of antiques — from household furnishings to
kitchen implements, from fine paintings to hatpins.
Assembling the Tool Collection
Louise and Alan visited the artist and author Eric Sloane, who was
also a longtime collector of Americana. Though Alan had been collecting
tools of the workshop, it was after seeing the new setting for Sloane’s
collection of tools in a museum in Connecticut that Alan began
assembling a collection of tools specific to particular trades.
Many of the antiques the Sellars acquired during their travels were used
to furnish and decorate the gift shop portion of the hardware store, and
for many years only a select few of the favorite antique tools were on
display — and the dozen or so current favorites were simply displayed on
the wall of the family room of the house, while most of the other tools
were stored in boxes in the workshop behind the house. For special
occasions some of the tools were selected, displayed, and their use
demonstrated at many local schools, county and state fairs.
Displaying the Growing Collection.
In 1978 Alan and two employees of the hardware store, Carter Butterworth
and Don Dougan, began building panels to arrange and display the
collection of tools stored in boxes in Alan’s workshop. Alan wanted to
exhibit his collection to the public, and he solved the question of
“Where?” by hanging the display panels from the ceiling above the
merchandise in the Hardware Store. Soon there were over a hundred and
twenty display panels hanging back-to-back throughout the store. The
panels were in a constant state of revision and addition as Alan
continued to find more items to improve the collection.
In 1985, the
hardware store moved to a larger building — partially to accommodate the
tool collection and also to provide gallery space for the developing art
collection. One section of the new building was turned into a tool
museum, and an art gallery was made for the paintings. Mark Wright was
hired to help Don and Carter with these projects. At this point many of
the tool displays were edited and consolidated into a denser and richer
selection totaling about one hundred panels. In 1988, the tools were
exhibited in a large gallery in north Atlanta for several months.
A Gift to the Funk
Heritage Center at Reinhardt College
The Sellars
family
felt that the tools represented the love and care of the craftsmen who
used them — the tools are living pieces of history that fit within the
hand. Though Alan passed away on Christmas Eve of 1991, he and Louise
have given us a gift, part of our own heritage, preserved and presented
so that we, too, might see the everyday workings of the past. Louise Sellars indicated it was always Alan’s desire that his collection become
a living educational experience. She felt that by donating his
collection to Reinhardt College, her husband’s wishes would be
fulfilled. The collection is presented in his memory.
Printable
Brochure in pdf format
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