Salem church sets storied silver work on auction block

SALEM -- Selling the family silver is generally an act of financial distress, but at one of the oldest churches in North America, the situation is just the opposite.

The First Church in Salem, which was founded in 1629 and counted victims as well as judges in the Salem witch trials among its early members, is auctioning off 14 silver tankards, flagons, and beakers in hope of raising $1 million to accelerate growth in membership and programming that began in the late 1990s.

Most of the money will go to making the gray granite church building, which opened in 1836, fully accessible to people who are disabled.

The sale is embraced by a congregation whose roots stretch back to when Roger Williams, the third minister at the church, was shown the door in 1635 for preaching that was considered too radical. He went on to found Rhode Island.

"Our understanding of what is sacred has changed over the centuries," the Rev. Jeffrey Barz-Snell, First Church's pastor, said in an interview yesterday. Rather than hoard prized silver possessions dating to centuries when diversity of any kind was little tolerated, "the people involved in our church now are more concerned with other people, and with the broader community," he said.

The church is selling a fraction of its 70-piece collection, but some of the most important items in American silvercraft are going on the auction block Jan. 18.

They include a cup given to the church by John Higginson, a Salem merchant who interviewed alleged witches and witnesses and recorded their confessions during the Salem witch trials of 1692; a beaker made in 1670 by Jeremiah Dummer, the first native-born American silversmith; and a tankard by John Coney between 1690 and 1710, featuring a European baroque style found in American silver only in the work of Boston smiths.

The sale "is wildly exciting from an antique silver perspective," said Jeanne Sloane, head of the silver department at Christie's, the auction house handling the sale, which was first reported in The Salem News.

"When silver has been the property of a church, we know its provenance, and it has been under terrific care, not left out, not polished too much, not suffering from excessive wear."

In addition, she said, "the early congregations were radically Puritan, so they threw off the trappings of the Anglican high church predecessors they were rebelling against. You do not get engraved crucifixions . . . The pieces are not different from the regular kind of American silver that collectors want."

Sloane said that the goal of the auction is $1 million in sales, but that "there is no ceiling."

"If a couple of people decide this is the opportunity of a lifetime, you can get a price over the high estimate," she said.

That estimate includes valuations of $300,000 for the Coney tankard, $250,000 for the Dummer beaker, and $120,000 for the Higginson cup.

A flagon weighing more than 40 ounces, which Sloane called the single most important piece of silver ever made in Salem, is also to be auctioned, with an estimated top value of $120,000.

First Church will retain a Paul Revere silver set it uses for communion on special occasions, as well as a silver bowl used in baptisms here for more than 200 years.

This is the second high-profile sale of early American silver by a Massachusetts church in recent years. In 2001, United First Parish Church in Quincy, which was founded in 1639 and is the burial place of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, sold 11 pieces, the value of which at auction had been estimated at around $1 million. The pieces sold for about $3 million.

In that sale, some people, including a former pastor, complained that the church was selling off its heritage; others were unhappy with the sale but felt the church had no choice, given a dwindling membership and a desperate need to fund repairs.

First Church in Salem has no such problems, Barz-Snell said.

"There is no urgency pushing this," he said. "It is the recognition that the church is growing, Salem is growing, and the church is poised, as a progressive Christian church, to become more involved with the broader community."

He said that the Unitarian church's membership is now about 130, about double what it was when he became pastor in 1998. He said two deacons proposed selling some of the highly valued silver after it became apparent that $300,000, raised from the membership to make the church handicapped accessible, was far short of what was needed.

"The decision was made by a democratic vote after considerable debate," Barz-Snell said.

"What is most important for us is the ability to serve our [church] community and the broader community," he said.

"Part of that is maintaining a building that is well maintained and accessible to all."

Thieves have attempted to steal the church's silver collection in the past, he said, stressing that the silver is stored in a secure location away from the church premises.

Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com.