LEWISBURG — On Thursday, July 28, the Lewisburg Historical Society held its first quarter auction. The event was a public fundraiser to garner funds to build a new storage facility for the antique collections at the Society’s Train Depot in the village.
A quarter auction is different from a normal auction. At this event, each person paid $5 to attend and received a single bid paddle, numbered from one to 200. Additional paddles were $2 each. When an item was up for bid, a bidder pitched in a quarter per paddle to be eligible for a bid if they chose to do so. An auctioneer then drew a numbered chip from a rotating bin and announced the number of the winning paddle.
Over 100 people attended this event, with roughly 100 items up for bid, donated by a large number of area businesses and private donors. There were gift certificates to a number of restaurants, food baskets and more
“We trying to put up a new building,” Diane Shrout, treasurer of the Lewisburg Historical Society, said. “This is our efforts to preserve our past — the old building is falling apart on us.”
“The items have all been donated,” she said. “The items range from just a few dollars to over $100. A person bids a quarter for every $25 increment in an item. So if an item is $45 dollars, two quarters would be needed for the bid. I think the most we have is a $1.50 bid a person can place on four tickets to the Cincinnati Reds game in September against the Pirates, and the Dayton Art Museum passes.”
Shrout said the quarter auction could become an annual event.
“We conduct a number of fundraisers throughout the year, such as the Lewisburg Haunted Caves in October,” she said. “We have the blacksmith shop in town about one Saturday per month and give demonstrations. We want to keep our traditions for our kids to see what lives were all about in the past and for the kids to appreciate some of the values we grew up with here.”
Everett Trittschuh is the president of the LHS.
“We are in the first phase of constructing a new building,” said Trittschuh. “This fundraiser will help get our 40×80 building rolling. We had to give away items to other clubs and buyers because we just didn’t have the room.”
According to Trittschuh, the Lewisburg Historical Society as originally founded in the 1990s to preserve the train depot.
“They were about to make it into a gift shop, but that didn’t work so we got together to move the building down to the site where the village is at now,” he said. “Now we are trying to expand with the Singer Blacksmith shop that closed back decades ago.”
