Ron opened his first antique shop in July of 1973 in a renovated one-room school house on NY State Highway 23, between Morris and South New Berlin, upstate New York. A history teacher at the time, the store was seasonal and open for two summers. From the experience, he learned first-hand the clichéd wisdom of ‘Location, location, location.’ While Schoolhouse Curio was situated on a main artery, traffic was not enough to sustain the enterprise.

After leaving teaching, he spent a couple of years as a general contractor renovating, restoring and building homes. The first year, he and his partner, Jim Cahill, were quite successful, however, high interest rates and a local recession during the second year were crippling and the business was dissolved. Casting about for something to do, Ron and his wife at the time, Veronica, started buying antiques at flea markets, garage sales and auctions and reselling them at large Northeast shows like Brimfield, Massachusetts, Kutztown, Pennsylvania and Madison, New York.

In 1980, they leased and renovated a large Victorian house on Route 28, just south of Cooperstown, and established the first multi-dealer shop in Otsego County, which they named ‘Peddlers’ Mall.’ Attracted by the proximity to the ‘Village of Museums,’ the dealer spaces were filled immediately and business was good from opening day. Unfortunately, ten weeks later the store was broken into, robbed and burned to the ground. They used the modest insurance settlement to rent a storefront in the downtown area of Cooperstown, naming it Gadzooks! Antiques. The shop took off and after a year, they relocated to a much larger building on Chestnut Street, the Burr Chevrolet Building.

The Burr Chevrolet Building was built in 1928, a California Mission-style structure with 5,000 square feet. They used the front half to house Gadzooks! and after purchasing the property, later built an apartment in the rear to live in. The first ten years were ones of steady expansion. However, again beset by recession and falling sales, in 1990 the enterprise teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Ron, now on his own, reorganized the business and rented out spaces to other dealers to keep the mortgage and overhead paid. The Cooperstown Antiques Center prospered and after four years, as dealers left, Ron took over their spaces and soon, blessedly, had the place to himself again. He eventually renamed the store Ron Mitchell Art and Antiques.

From then on, business got better and better and the customer base swelled, making it the most successful and longest-lived antique shop in Cooperstown’s history. The store received glowing reviews in the ‘New York Times,’ ‘Travel and Leisure Magazine,’ ‘The Antique Trader,’ ‘Northeast Antiques,’ ‘Better Homes and Gardens’ and many other regional and national publications.

In 2007, tired of upstate New York winters and a shrinking local economy, Ron sold the building to a group of investors establishing The Bank of Cooperstown, and headed south, sights set on central North Carolina. After exploring the region to the tune of 3,000 miles, he settled on Sanford, a small city some 40 miles south of the Durham-Raleigh Triangle area. Ron rented a storefront on South Steele Street, effectively Sanford’s Main Street, and spent two months renovating the space before opening on 1 October.

Ron is a history buff who loves to work with his hands, so the two areas come together in his chosen field nicely. He has been restoring and rewiring lamps for 35 years and is probably among the top 100 experts in the country. In Cooperstown, the restoration of vintage lighting for sale and rewiring customers’ lamps in large measure supported the store’s success.

Ron’s personal decorative tastes run to the Orient. He lives with Chinese, Japanese and Southeast Asian antiques at home and reserves a large section of his new store for the genre. The shop is otherwise extremely eclectic with American and European antiques, art and vintage accessories, as well as contemporary art and hand-crafted objects and furniture. While once an age-purist, he now chooses not to discriminate against objects d’art merely because of their youth.

919-708-7415