One Thousand Vintage Garments Found in an Appalachian Farmhouse

Four vintage dealers uncover a single family's Depression-era survival story written in thread and patches

Aug 31, 2025

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One night in April, Kristin Boehler, of Vassar Girl Vintage, was scrolling through online auction listings when she came across an abandoned farmhouse estate in rural Appalachia, about an eight and a half hour drive from her home in Buffalo, New York. The property looked like it had been abandoned for years — it had been — and the photographs showed piles of belongings jumbled together: mouse traps, canning jars still in their packaging, wedding dresses, and car parts.

She sent the link to her daughter Addie, also a vintage dealer who goes by Arm Vintage, as a joke. "Addie and I will frequently look at the online auction sites together and admire things, we'll send things back and forth that we like," she explained. "I sent it to her just feeling silly one day as a joke, like, 'ha, do you want to drive eight and a half hours and go buy some stuff?'"

About ten minutes later, both mother and daughter had the same realization. They texted back and forth simultaneously: "On second thought..."

It was the week before Easter, and Kristin was swamped with work. She didn't have money to invest in such an uncertain vintage buy—but she did have two free hotel night points, and it was her birthday weekend. She thought that even if they drove only to find garbage, at least they'd have a story and some funny memories.

"We'll look back on it in the years and say, 'remember when we did that' and we'll eat good food and we'll go see some of the local caves and it'll just be a funny story for my birthday," she reasoned. So, Kristin booked the nights at an area Holiday Inn.

The property sat at the end of a country road in a very small rural Appalachian community in Virginia, near the mountains and the West Virginia border. When Addie and Kristin arrived, the red buds were blooming and the cherry blossoms had already opened—a stark contrast to the still-winter landscape they'd left behind in Buffalo.

During the auction preview, they explored the grounds, getting a feel for the buildings and separate rooms since the bids would be by room, series of rooms, or building. They discovered this property had been a working farm and general store that belonged to the Ryman family.

At first, Kristin didn’t find the vintage clothes they were looking for. "All of the mysterious pictures I had convinced myself had amazing vintage clothes—just by enlarging the picture about a thousand times and zooming in—were just stacks of garbage bags, stuffed with folded tents, folded sleeping bags. Nothing we were looking for... but what wasn't pictured was the good stuff."

The buildings were so dark they could barely see what was inside at first. But then, as the day went on, they started to find rooms with seas of boxes, boxes full of clothing piled sky high. The good stuff.

Kristin called her longtime friends and fellow seasoned vintage dealers, Diane Schaefer and Mike West of Silo Curb, describing what they'd found. She asked if they'd like to go all-in on an auction bid together. Mike said yes right away, and Diane agreed. Back at the Holiday Inn, Kristin started pulling together the numbers in a spreadsheet and the group came up with their collective bid.

"It was a huge leap of faith on their part," Kristin said. “That's where 30 years of knowing each other came in,” Diane explained, “just knowing their level of taste, and knowing them.”

"This was like a checking-the-couch-cushions-for-change situation," she continued. "Once we decided on it, we were really like, 'we're gonna go for this.'"

The next day, the entire auction lasted just eight minutes. "I've never seen an auction that quick," Diane said. "It felt like it was over in literally seconds." Kristin was bidding on the auction site on her laptop, with Addie calling on her phone. Diane and Mike were on speaker phone, waiting anxiously.

When it was over, they had won the chicken coop, two bedrooms in the house, a two-story cinder block building, the barn, and the attic.

"We were jumping around and screaming because we did not expect it—absolutely did not expect it," Diane recalled.

Mike immediately said, "Absolutely, we're going down there. They can't handle that all by themselves. We're going." So Diane and Mike slept three hours, then drove to the farm at dawn, arriving as light broke over the property. Dressed in hazmat suits, goggles, gloves, hats and masks, they began what would feel like a game show, racing against their deadline to empty the buildings they'd purchased.

“That's where 30 years of knowing each other came in.”
— Diane Schaefer, Silo Curb

Addie was the first one into one the storage building she'd targeted from the auction photos. When Diane joined her, putting on her hazmat suit, Addie pointed to what looked like a sea of boxes stacked five high, they all contained vintage clothing, packed and stored, untouched, for approximately 70 years. The tight packing had preserved the contents in ways that typically wouldn't happen in an abandoned building.

What they found was extraordinary: nearly 1,000 pieces of clothing from a single family, spanning from the 1930s Depression era through the mid-1940s. It was the complete collection of a multi-generational farming family who had lived through the Great Depression and World War II, documented in fabric and thread.

These clothes told a story of survival. Sixty feed sack dresses showed identical wear patterns—eye-shaped patches on the fronts where the weight of daily burdens had worn through the fabric as women leaned against counters. The same patches appeared on dresses ranging from child-size to grandmother-size, all made from the same dress patterns. Even the children had worked, and labored hard.

“They clung on to what they could because, it seems as though they were often forced to give up other things,” Kristin said, “in some cases freedom, time, lives, help.”

The family had practiced an extreme form of conservation that can now be seen as artistry. "The mending is their writing," explains Kristin. "This was not a family that left a written heritage. They didn't have the luxury of leaving a written heritage. However, all the clothes that we got out of that house were the story of a family's survival and of perseverance. Their history was written not on paper, but in what they saved."

The Rymans mended their clothing until there was more patching than original fabric. Men's work shirts, originally blue chambray, had been worn so long they appeared completely white—until closer examination revealed they were "ghost shirts," still blue at the bottom where they'd been tucked into pants, fading to white at the collars from sun exposure. The whisper of overall straps were visible on the fronts, creating the record of their daily labor.

"The mending is their writing. This was not a family that left a written heritage."
— Kristin Boehler, of Vassar Girl Vintage

Some pieces defied conventional modern understanding of clothing repair. Addie's favorite find was a pair of 1930s salt-and-pepper work pants where one leg had been patched with half of a vest, hanging down from the knee like a protective pad. What initially looked strange to modern eyes had been an urgent necessity—protection against kneeling on rocks and soil for someone who couldn't afford to stop working because of torn clothing.

They used everything, transforming feed sacks into everything from dresses to underwear. Before companies began printing decorative patterns on feed sacks, these families were already repurposing the plain bags, demonstrating resourcefulness that went beyond mere frugality. They saved fabric scraps to patch worn areas of garments, creating time capsules where faded dress fronts revealed original color variations in the patches hidden under arms.

Perhaps most remarkably, the family had made buttons from pressed paper—layer upon layer of craft paper, possibly varnished — essentially homemade cardboard — buttons that spoke to the depths of economic hardship they had endured. "When you're making your buttons out of paper, that is really doing what you need to do to get your family as well as you can to the other side," said Kristin.

For the next few days, the dealers worked in hazmat suits, sorting rapidly through decades of accumulation. Everything they found was coated in 70 years of chicken feed, lime, and dust, but beneath the grime lay remarkable preservation.

"It's amazing we did not find any animals," said Kristin, "because this used to be a general store, and up in the attic we found probably 500 pounds of sugar. That should have been mouse heaven—that's where I would be if I was a mouse! And yet, nothing had been inside."

The picking was a physical labor. "Every day we'd get into the hotel room and we basically strip down and put our clothes in a plastic bag," Kristin recalled. "We would come home so tired, but I wouldn't even lie down on the bed until I showered. I would lie down on the floor while Addie showered because I was way dirtier than that floor."

The team worked quickly, pulling things out of the buildings without time to truly examine them. "Some of the things we literally did not see until we got home to organize them," said Kristin. "Some of them, we didn't even see till we washed them." Together they filled around 60 contractor bags.

"My last image before Mike and I left," Diane said, "was Kristin sitting on the floor in her hazmat suit—amidst squalor, probably dangerous—picking little tiny pieces of fabric out of the dust, which she then washed and laid out like a puzzle."

Even the smallest scraps had value. "When I picked up those tiny pieces of fabric,” Kristin said, “I was reminded that — not just to us, but to the original owners — rags have integrity. They aren't without value. And to the original owners, to save so many rags, that freed up the amount of money that you could buy your kid a lunch they could take to school."

Back home, the processing began. Each partner fell into their natural roles: Diane specialized in children's vintage, Kristin in menswear, and Addie in women's clothing. Addie handled much of the washing and mending, following the original techniques she observed in the garments.

"I did so much of the washing, even things you wouldn't normally think of like suits or overcoats or very delicate textiles," she explained. "Just the other day I washed my very last hand-wash garment.”

One particular coat stood out. "Mike risked his life climbing up a ladder to pull this coat out—we were like, ‘I think that’s cloth? Or is it wood?' It had mud, moss, all the mud dauber nests that you can even imagine. But we saw the coat’s clasps — they were beautiful.” When Addie tried to gently handwash the coat in her big laundry sink, she had to dip it into the water slowly.

“It was so stiff, it had rigor mortis. It stood on its own,” she said. After ten changes of water, it cleaned up beautifully.

Often, Addie struggled to replicate the crude, utilitarian mending style of the garments — her historically-accuracy approach required her to unlearn her own refined techniques, having to adjust her machine to looser settings and even switch hands to approximate the original seamstress's methods.

"My mending is so good that you can't even tell that it's been mended sometimes, and that's just not the way that she did it," Addie explains. "I had to turn my swing machine’s tension down, lift my presser foot so it was jumping. I was mending using my open embroidery foot with my left hand."

The team tried to keep the original mending intact as much as possible, adding only structural repairs—replacing zippers, sewing on missing buttons, securing loose patches. "I followed the original techniques they used for the mending,” Addie explained. “If it was hand mending, I would hand mend. If it was machine, I would do machine mending."

The original mending style was distinctly utilitarian. " It's a language — a language of mending,” she said. “This was definitely more farm style mending., primitive mending. It's very crude. It's like the sewer took whatever scraps she had, placed them down, sewed them quickly."

The dealers made a conscious decision not to "upcycle" the clothing in contemporary fashion. Instead, they preserved the original mending as historical documentation. Diane said they even coined the term "mouse lace" for areas where rodents had nibbled fabric into delicate, lace-like patterns—damage that had transcended destruction to become inadvertent art.

The Ryman Collection represents a material record of how rural American families survived the Great Depression and World War II, written in the language of mending, patching, and conservation. Each eye-shaped patch, each sun-faded shirt, each paper button tells part of a story about resilience, community, and the dignity found in making do with what you have."

Though the Ryman family scattered after the war — their children becoming teachers and accountants, trading blue collar work for white collar jobs in distant cities — their clothing tells the story of rural 20th-century America. Their clothes are the story of families who held together through economic catastrophe by mending what they had, saving what they could, and finding beauty in the midst of necessity. Now their story lives on in the hands of these four dealers.

Rather than selling pieces individually, the dealers decided to premier the collection together as a testament to one family's survival. "We felt it was important to show it together because it was a story of survival. It's a story of resilience. It's a story of one family's life as emblematic of the rural areas of America in the 20th century,” Kristin said.

The collection, which documents a vanished way of life, will premier in the seminar room at the Sturbridge Show during Brimfield, under the collective brand, Four Vintage.

"I would say that as a group, we feel both honored and humbled to be stewards of this collection," Kristin reflects. "We know we're now benefiting from the Rymans labor, from their hardship. The only thing we know to do is to keep acknowledging that we are here doing this because of them. Because of their amazing work."

Addie said working on this collection has been transformative for her. "I think this clothing made me want to do it better. Made me want to be better as a person and as a dealer. Just being respectful. I think it's a sign of respect for the people that wore the clothing in the past. Saving everything. They took so much time and effort to mend these clothes and keep them that we should be trying to do the same thing."

“I think this clothing made me want to do it better. Made me want to be better as a person and as a dealer.”
— Adeline Marfoglia, Arm Vintage

The collection also challenges conventional definitions of work wear, which typically focuses on men's clothing like denim and chore coats. "Work wear is such a popular thing now, but we would like to expand the definition," Kristin explains. "Because it's not just the clothing the men wore on the farm or to the docks. Work wear is more than denim. It's also the work that the women were doing."

This perspective reflects both their experience as women in a male-dominated field and their commitment to preserving overlooked histories. "Because we're women in the vintage clothing field, and especially in the vintage work wear field, you don't see as much appreciation for the garments women wore when they worked," Addie observes. "So many people would be going into that house and bidding and just taking out all the jeans, all the coats, and then leaving everything else. And we really took the time and care to take all the clothes, to take the scraps, wash the scraps."

Their approach honors the reality that survival during the Depression era depended on everyone's labor, and that women's work — skilled labor that kept families intact during America's darkest economic period — women’s work that is preserved in thread and patches, is work that deserves reverence, too.