CityView Magazine - Fayetteville, NC
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/28915
TREASURE HUNTERS the quite delightful little town becomes the place to be for antique hunters in North Carolina. (This year’s spring street fair will be held on May 7th.) It may look like an exceptionally large Antiques Roadshow with stately century-old furniture, estate jewelry and exquisite pieces of crystal on display, but for antique hunters it may just be a little better, because for each of the two fair days those who love antique can find treasures to take home. The main street of Cameron, arranged along a half mile of NC Highway 24-27, will itself transport you back to a time when neighbors sat on porches together sipping lemonade, enjoying a nice cool southern breeze. It is decidedly a place that could not have been designed better for antique enthusiasts to feel at home. Isabel Thomas, a native of Cameron, remembers with great fondness her days as a young girl growing up in the town. With her passion and love of those days gone by, it was only fitting that she was one of the first to open up an antiques store in Cameron during the 1970s. “It did seem like the natural thing for me to do,” Thomas says at age 86. “I had a tea-room at the time with a friend, Frances Floyd, in my grandmother’s house. People would come from Chapel Hill and Durham for tea, coffee and a piece of homemade coffee cake or pie,” she explains. “They would tell us how charming everything was. I guess some people think that anything that old is charming,” she laughs. Thomas opened her antiques store in the Greenwood Inn in downtown Cameron. “My father owned the building and left it to me. I wanted to do something with it that would keep it going so it would not just deteriorate.” When the doors opened to her store, the tradition of selling antiques in Cameron began. Soon, others F Twice a year the historic town of Cameron attracts antique lovers from near and far | By Diane Silcox-Jarrett or more than twenty years antique lovers have been able to enjoy the thrill of the hunt at the bi-annual Antique Street Fair in the town of Cameron, North Carolina. On the first Saturday of each May and October more than 300 antique dealers come to Cameron to sell their antiques, collectibles and one-of-a kind treasures, and CityViewNC.com | 45