Recent Thrift Store Acquisitons

This has been a great week for thrift store finds.  Although there is a lot of work I am supposed to be getting done this summer, being at my parents' house for a few months leads to a lot of thrift shopping in and around central PA.  Here are two amazing vintage finds that I came upon at two different Salvation Army stores this week. 

This dress is from the sixties I believe, and although it is made of some kind of poly blend material, it is beautiful!  It sort of reminds me of the older sister to one of the two dresses I bought from Anthropologie back during a period of profligate spending, the "Dandelion Wish" dress.  This dress also has a dandelion pattern to it.  Even though this dress is rather large (and was mistakenly placed in the nightgown section at the Sal Val!), the tie at the waist makes it fit well.  I was so excited to find it, especially since I had pretty much resigned myself to a failed thrift excursion by the time I made it to the nightgowns.

My second find of the week was this purse.  I am fairly new to this whole vintage scavenging game, but I saw this out of the corner of my eye at the thrift store and immediately said to myself, "that looks like lucite!"  And it is, in fact, lucite.  These wicker purses (brand name "Princess Charming by Atlas") were touristy accessories made in Florida in the fifties and sixties.  Most of them have a clear plastic overlay on one side of the purse with either shells or flowers behind it as tropical, beachy decorations, but the former owner of this purse purposely removed this embellishment.  You can even see the little holes around the perimeter of one of the sides where the screen was removed if you look closely.  In other respects, though, this purse is in perfect condition and the lucite is beautiful.  I think I kind of prefer it without the screen anyway.  I was poking around ebay looking at some of these purses, and while the shells and things were neat as an old fashion trend, I think I like the simplicty of the wicker purse without the tropical embellishments.

All in all, I'd say this was not a bad ensemble to have put together for a grand total of eight dollars. The moral of the story is, always take a quick look at the nightgown section of your local thrift store. What looks like a nightgown to some people, may not look like a nightgown to others!

Covered Bridge and a Peter Pan Collar

This is an old covered bridge that is located a few miles from where my parents live, making for a very nice biking destination.  I'm not sure when this bridge was built, but it is only wide enough for one car to go through at once, so was designed more with horses in mind than modern, newfangled contraptions.  If you are ever in Washingtonville, PA, take a drive through this little bridge.  But beware of the 3 ton limit! 

This is a dress I found last week at a small vintage store that is off the interstate on the way to Williamsport, PA.  I love the collar on this thing, and the cuffs are also bordered with the same crocheted lace design.

The Millville Fireman’s Carnival, Millville, PA

To kick off the rural Pennsylvania carnival and fair season this summer I would like introduce the 82^nd annual Millville Fireman’s Carnival of Millville, PA!  My parents and I decided to head up to the carnival on the evening of Sunday, July 3, only to arrive at a sad and deserted fairgrounds.  Vespers!  No fair on Sundays in a Quaker town.  While my parents decided to catch the sermon, I wandered around the tiny fairgrounds and got a privileged look at the old carousel and carnival rides when there were no children or ride operators to thwart me.

This carousel is a classic Allan Herschell from the 1920s or 30s.  These are the original wooden carousel horses, still mobile after all these years.  From what limited information I have gathered about this carousel, I've learned that it was originally steam powered, but was converted to gas in the 1940s.  The gas engine was in operation from the 1940s until the 1990s, when the carousel finally went electric, but the gas engine is still available for perusal to any carousel rider.  My favorite part of any carousel is the calliope, and this calliope is a beauty!  It even has a drum attached to it for extra zest.  I am hoping that we will return sometime this week when the fair is actually running so I will have a chance to hear the authentic carnival sounds of the carousel calliope.  On the outside of the carousel are recent paintings of classic scenes from Millville and its environs. 

The other rides I checked out were the little carnival Ferris wheel and the kiddie cars that go around in a circle.  The Ferris wheel hasn’t been completely assembled yet, and as you can see the three seats that are missing at the top of the wheel are waiting patiently on the ground for their day of carnival glory.  This Ferris wheel is also pretty old, and dates from the time that it would have been considered regular sized!  The little cars are interesting because they are also from the 30s or 40s, which you can tell because they are modeled after classic Studebakers, or whatever 40s cars these might be. 

Any carnival enthusiast who makes it to a rural PA fair should make a point to play my all-time favorite carnival game: Ring a Bottle of Soda.  Sometimes I am very lucky at this game, and last year I won three bottles of soda in a single round.  I don’t even much like drinking the soda after I’ve won, but I like being able to bluster around the carnival with an armful of heavy glass bottles filled with vibrantly colored varieties of locally manufactured sodas (Big Ben’s of Catawissa, PA), most likely dropping them once or twice throughout the course of the evening and then tripping over them and making a lot of clinky racket (Of course I'm sober!  This is soda!).  Many times, though, I lose.  But the nice thing is that this game shows up at just about every local carnival over the summer, so if you manage it right you could probably stock up on soda to last you the winter.

Pennsylvania Excursion: The Williams Grove Park

Searching online for the best of central PA’s flea markets, I came across a few descriptions of one that takes place every weekend on the grounds of an abandoned amusement park.  The Williams Grove Amusement Park near Mechanicsburg, PA, was fully operational until 2005, which is less impressive than if it had been a ghost-park from the 1950s or something, as I had romanticized it in my head, but many of the buildings and structures are clearly from the early twentieth century when the park was in its heyday, so this is a great place to visit for a spooky, time-is-at-a-standstill-and-yet-the-flea-market-must-go-on sort of feeling.

One of my favorite parts of the ghost-park was the abandoned wooden roller-coaster, the Cyclone, which dates from 1933.  I am not a fan of roller-coasters in real life, but this ghost-coaster made me long for the fun-filled coaster youth I never had or wanted.  Apparently, most of the rides were successfully auctioned off when the park went under in 2005, but nobody wanted the park itself, or the poor Cyclone, so there the coaster car remains, as if it is just waiting to climb the hill again!  Most of the other buildings and structures have had the rides removed from them, such as the large circular building which I imagine housed the carousel.  All in all, meandering around the ghost-park is a worthwhile way to spend a Sunday morning if you are in the mood for some contemplative nostalgia, or if you like to find bargains.  The flea market itself is not the best I have ever seen.  It seemed to be rather tool and implement-heavy—a place you might venture to as a cheap alternative to Home Depot.  Although there were some interesting antiques and curiosities to be seen, I didn’t find anything to take home with me.  My mother bought a three dollar watermelon, however, which she was very excited about.  Make sure to check out flea-market-on-a-bus if only to say that you did! 

Note: there IS one ride at this flea market/park-that-time-forgot that is operational as a flea market draw/Pennsylvania oddity, and it is a steam locomotive from 1917 that you can ride for $2.  It has a loud whistle and it produces a lot of steam and smoke and it travels about a mile away from the flea market, stops, and then goes right back.  It doesn’t loop around or anything but simply reverses, and I thought it was very amusing that it goes through one of the flea market parking lots where people are trying to drive in and out off of the main road and there are no signs or lights or anything to tell people that A TRAIN IS COMING.  They just blow that whistle like mad and hope for the best.  This results in a minimal amount of chaos for the motorists, but overall the steam locomotive is a nice way to spice up the flea market experience and get a more refined sense of trains and their history.  In the train depot annex building there is also a one room “museum” with about two dozen old train lanterns hanging from the ceiling and a few interesting pictures on the wall of the train and station.