Tucked into a storefront on Conception Street in downtown Mobile, between Dauphin and Conti, a shop called Antiques and Estates has become the temporary resting place for a slice of north Mobile County history. Owner Bill Appling is working through roughly 1,000 items pulled from the historic Magee Farm homestead in Kushla, a project he calls one of the more meaningful undertakings of his career in the antiques business.
The Creole cottage-style farmhouse sits at the intersection of U.S. 45 and Alabama 158 and has stood since 1848, when it was built by Jacob Magee. Ownership passed to the Sturtevant family in 1898, and generations of that family filled the home with furniture, china, artwork and everyday keepsakes that stayed largely untouched for more than a century. The last surviving member of the family, Margaret Sturtevant, died in 2004 at age 93, closing out a direct family connection to the property that had lasted well over 100 years.
Saraland veterinarian Ben George purchased the farm in 2005 and spent several years, from 2007 to 2010, operating it as a small history museum open to the public. Appling said George eventually decided it was time to part with the collection after the museum concept never quite caught on with visitors the way he had hoped. Rather than run a standard estate sale, George asked Appling to handle the pieces individually, given their historical significance to Mobile County.
Among the items now on display are roughly 35 pieces of furniture, boxes of china and glassware, a couple hundred books, and stacks of linens and doilies that Appling says rarely surface in the antiques trade because families tend to hold onto them. Many of the objects date to the Civil War era and belonged directly to the Sturtevants, giving each piece a documented tie back to the farmhouse rather than an anonymous history.
The centerpiece of the collection is a Revolutionary War-era oil painting of Charles Morse, the great-grandfather of Samuel Morse, the inventor credited with Morse code. Appling has priced the painting at $3,800, making it both the oldest and most valuable single item from the farm. Also for sale are several paintings of the farmhouse itself, created by Margaret Sturtevant’s sister, Helen S. Tisdale, along with a hand-stitched log cabin-pattern quilt dating to the 1870s.
Appling, who grew up around downtown Mobile’s business scene and has run the nearby Joachim Street Antique Mall for several years, opened Antiques and Estates earlier this year. He said stepping inside the Magee Farm house for the first time felt like walking through someone else’s life’s work, comparing the experience to seeing his own shop from an outsider’s perspective. He is continuing to unwrap, clean and catalog items as they arrive from the property, with more expected to go on display in the coming weeks.
For area history buffs, the sale offers a rare chance to own a physical piece of a nearly 175-year-old Mobile County homestead, rather than simply reading about it. Appling said he hopes the pieces end up with buyers who appreciate their backstory rather than treating them as ordinary secondhand furnishings.