My house was built a little before 1760. No offense, but I prefer new construction like mine over your 1750 model. The cooking hooks in the fireplaces are so much more convenient for making big pots of gruel. I am a sucker for the latest and greatest technology that way though.
Well aren’t we all fancy-scmancy?! In my day we didn’t need cooking hooks. We just held the pots in our hands over the fire and we liked it!
I have a badly-worn copy of a souvenir program from the World’s Columbian Exposition, which was held in Chicago in 1893. I also own some stamps and postcards with nineteenth-century cancels, but I’m not sure if any of them predate the souvenir book, and can’t check them right now, as they’re still in my old bedroom at my parents’ house in Ohio.
I have a book purchased by an ancestor in 1856. It is still in beautiful condition.
I also have a spinning wheels at least 160 years old. Still in working condition.
I also have some fossils that, like Qadgop’s, are about 250 million years old.
What I love about this place is: Nobody’s come in and seriously said ‘nothing is older than 6000 years old’
I have some fine china that was manufactured in the 1800’s, wedding presents to my great-grandparents. They were married about 1880. I also have a chair that my great-grandfather made my hand which is also from the late 1800’s. On the other side of the family, I have my grandfather’s pocket watch, circa 1910. I have some old coins as well.
Just remembered that I have a stone spearpoint from St. Paul Island that is likely many hundreds of years old.
I have a dutch book titled (thanks Coldie) “The history of the Catholic Church up to modern times.” It was published in the 1680’s.
I also have a sea chest that some antique dealer decided to refinish and sold to me for $400.00 dollars.
Guess he (and I) didn’t know to leave that chest as it was.
Or maybe he did.
Plus (before the HARD times), I was able to present close friends with illuminated pages that Monks wrote in the 16th century.
Q
Had the longest: a Victorinox Swiss Army Knife I was given by my dad when I was 7 (I’m now 27).
Oldest: I have some coins from the turn of the century. Somewhere in a steamer trunk in a relative’s house in England is a fossilized moth or butterfly (never had it looked at by a professional, so I’ve got no idea how old it really is).
I have some silver dollars from the 1800s, but I’d have to go look to find the earliest - and I’m way too lazy tonight to do so.
I don’t have anything antique. I still have a few items from my college days – some books and my bong. More than 30 years old now…
The thing I’ve probably owned the longest is a cabage patch kid from the year that people went nuts and beat people up over. I’m 32, and I got him when I was 6.
The oldest object I own at all that gets used every day is the bench from my great-grandmother’s sewing desk: it sits beside my computer chair for as a table for my mouse. It’s from the early to mid 1940s, puting it at bit more than twice my age. I have a table topped with blue glass from the 1940s or 50s too. There are older things in the house, including wine glasses from pre-WII, hurricane lanterns from the turn of the century, and a couple of cookbooks from the 1800s, but those are not mine.
Natural, I have bags and boxes of rocks, gems and fossils whose ages are a mystery to me, but I’m guessing old.
Man-made, I have my great-great grandfather’s navy bible dated 1758.
Oh, look, the nouveau riche have arrived. I hope you realize that all that new construction will just bring down prices in the neighborhood.
I have a tiny beat-up fairy perched on my Christmas tree.
It is 68.8 years old, same as me. My gramps bought it the day I was born and it’s been handed on down through the years
I own my ancient, worn out body and that’s about it.
An apparently salacious medieval romance novel from 1869. “Apparently” because I have yet to read it, I just read some details about it online.
I have a copy of the book Swiss Family Robinson, given to one of my relatives at the end of the school year in 1901.
As for my own personal possessions, I found a book called The Best Short Stories of 1918 in a box someone at school was going to sell to Half-Priced Books. I snatched it up.
In my family we have a four-generation photograph of women from my mother’s side, circa 1897. The youngest person in the photo is my great-grandmother, who was seven years old at the time. Then it’s her mother, her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother. So I can say that I know what my great great great great grandmother looked like.