This china cabinet came from the old Fulton home; they were early settlers of White Bear Lake. This was one of the pieces that Helen Fillebrown traded Marshall Washington to board his mother here during the summers. He ran a local second-hand store. It is filled with silver and silver plated items from 1850-1930. The earliest is the undated coffee and tea service on the top shelf that even has a covered dish to pour the dregs of one’s cup. Helen Fillebrown’s great-grandfather John Gottfried Schwing and granduncle William Carnes Kendrick were very successful silversmiths and jewelers in Louisville, Kentucky, so I don’t doubt that some of these pieces originated with them.

“That came from the old Fulton home. Now, the Fultons were among the pioneers of White Bear. They lived through a chain of circumstances. It came to us when their house was sold, and they vanished from the scene. This was stored in Marshall Washington’s antique shop. I don’t know if you know anything about him, but he was quite a character and he had quite a well-known—first it was a secondhand store—until he found that people were becoming interested in anything antique that he could find and finally turned into a regular antique dealer. Much of this furniture in various parts of the house, I bought from him. And this was stored in the shed of a home belonging to his daughter and her husband. And when they passed away, it found its way to his shop. And it stayed there until the depression because it was too big and people weren’t buying big things like that at that time. So it was left over. I knew him very well. In fact, his mother lived here part of the time in the summers with us. And I went to him not thinking of buying anything for myself.” -Helen Fillebrown