For 67 years, some member of Liana Franklin’s family has been unlocking the door of The Totem Post, visiting with customers for hours, and sending them off with a treasure, or at least a memory.

Same story next door at the Jack & Jill Nut Shoppe with Marc Rudd’s family, for 50 years now.

Across the street, Jim Lawrence traces the edges of a framed photo on the wall from the 1930s, showing the historic brick home that houses the Quintessence glassblowing shop. His twin brother, John, has been working there for 41 years; Jim has been working out of the Lawrence Family Glass Blowers shop around the corner for 43. Their father, Dick, brought this artisan trade to downtown Nashville in 1967, and Jim remembers when downtown was quiet enough for him and his brother to sit outside at night and hear the mechanical “click” of the stoplight change from go, to slow, to stop and back again.

On Oct. 30, roughly one-third of downtown Nashville will be sold to the highest bidders, including the buildings that house these landmark shops and many others.

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The buildings and other lots are part of the estate of Frank “Andy” Rogers, who, like his father before him, built and/or owned much of Nashville’s business core for decades.

The long list of properties to be auctioned includes the homes of 10 shops on the most-traveled stretch of Van Buren Street, such as 58 South, Rhonda Kay’s and Male Instinct; almost a block of East Franklin Street, including the complex that houses Fearrin’s Ice Cream & Yogurt Depot, Cedar Creek Winery and The Vintage Rose; all of the Antique Alley craftsman community on Jefferson Street, including shops closer to Franklin Street like Brown County Pottery and K. Bellum Leather; the historic Bartley House; the historic Ferguson House; and the Professional Building, home to a retail shop and a handful of professional offices.

Several parking lots or vacant lots in Nashville also are on the list, along with properties further outside town, like Rogers’ home on Jackson Branch Ridge Road.

RELATED STORY: How the auction will work

The Totem Post is perhaps the longest-running business in downtown Nashville aside from the 70-year-old Brown County Playhouse two doors down, which also was at one time owned by Rogers, and before him, his father, Jack.

“It has to happen,” Franklin says with a sigh, about some sort of change coming. “Andy’s not here anymore.”

“We had somebody just the other day come in and say, ‘Oh we just love to come in here; it’s so peaceful, it’s so nostalgic. We hope you can be here forever,’” Franklin said.

“’Well, we’re working on it.’”

Whispers about the auction began to circulate over the summer; then, the Nashville Town Council brought it up in a workshop on July 25 about a strategic direction for the town.

Adviser Dax Norton encouraged members to think about what they, as elected officials, could do to make sure “the right person or group of people” invests in and rehabilitates these properties. The council hasn’t had a follow-up planning session since then.

“If the wrong person gets ahold of them, you are in trouble,” Norton said. For example, if he bought one, he said he wouldn’t have the money to fix it up, and that kind of thing gets noticed and has ripple effects out into the Nashville economy.

Likewise, if a generational landmark sells to a new owner who wants to change it — even knock it down and build something new — locals and visitors are going to have something to say about it.

Local leaders can sit back and see what happens, or they can direct the inevitable change, Norton said.

“What’s your vision for what Nashville wants to see happen?” he asked town employees and council members in the room. “Can you tell a potential investor what the vision is?”

“I think that everybody’s vision is to keep it the same, and unfortunately, that’s not going to happen,” said longtime resident and Town Attorney James T. Roberts.

The way it’s always been

The Mills family has been making pottery at the corner of Franklin Street and Honeysuckle Lane for 51 years. The late John Mills started the shop when he was a student at Indiana University, carrying on the pottery tradition of the ‘30s that had grown out of a back room a couple doors down.

John’s wife, Beth Mills, is the potter now at this corner, like her uncle before her, the late Karl Martz of the original Brown County Pottery.

Her shop is scheduled to be auctioned in a group with the rest of Antique Alley and the historic Ferguson House.

“I’d like to stay,” Mills said, quietly. “… But it’s not up to me.”

Her lease ran out over the winter and wasn’t renewed by the property management company.

“I have ideas,” was all she could say about her future.

“I’m still going full bore until I hear otherwise.”

Fifteen other shops are tucked into Antique Alley including the Old Ferguson House, a former inn once run by notorious character Alice Weaver. Weaver was John Mills’ first landlady here, charging $25 per month in rent.

Andy Rogers bought the properties some time after her death in 1985. A couple shops have hand-lettered signs in their windows heralding how long they’ve been there: 46 years for the Paint Box Art Gallery, 34 for Through the Looking Glass etched glass and stone carving.

“We’re hoping that a new owner will take into consideration that Antique Alley was set up for artisan-type shops, and it’s always been known to have reasonable rents for artisans,” said Shelley Hayes, owner of yarn shop The Clay Purl, one of the newest tenants. “We’re hoping that somebody will take it on that wants to support the arts.”

Rogers did, Lawrence said. He understood that the artisans in his shops would have to produce a higher volume of products to sell if his rents rose, which could hurt the quality of those products, and he didn’t want to upset that balance.

“Originally, we had leases with Andy, but (about updates), he always said, ‘I’m working on it; I’ll get you one.’

“We didn’t need one, because with Andy it was a handshake,” Lawrence said. “He was one of the most honest guys you’d ever meet in your life. His word was his bond. A lot of the tenants here didn’t have one.”

Lawrence has a one-year lease with the management company that’s over Rogers’ properties now. Tenants on The Totem Post’s side of Van Buren have differing lease lengths, ranging from month-to-month to the end of 2024.

“Of course, we want to own the property,” Franklin said about The Totem Post building, not wanting to reveal too much of her plan.

“We’ve got 67 years invested in here,” she said. “It’s not even me, it’s my family. It’s walking through that door and feeling my parents still here, you know? it’s history. My kids grew up with it. It’s a lot more than, ‘Just move.’”

Lawrence was similarly private about his plans for auction day, but he said he’d be there.

He has no real backup plan in case a new owner wouldn’t want him to stay.

He understands that much of Nashville’s appeal — for residents and for visitors — is that it’s a place where time seems to stand still. When visitors from across the state line comment that they’re an hour behind Nashville, Lawrence tells them, “Don’t worry about it, because we’re 200 years behind.”

“I would anticipate the next owner to want some of those same aspects to continue, especially the stability aspect,” he said.

However, that might not be every buyer’s vision.

“I think everybody in this room, we don’t want to see major changes to the overall look of town, but we don’t have any control over it,” town council President Jane Gore told the Nashville Redevelopment Commission this month. “Who’s going to buy them? Is it going to be the someone from the next generation that really doesn’t care about the look that we have? It’s scary.”

Norton told Nashville leaders that if they think residents want things a certain way, they might want to think about putting policies in place to drive those decisions.

For instance, it’s a myth that Nashville has a law that prohibits chain restaurants.

Also, there are few rules protecting properties that could be considered historic.

The town has a sort of “demolition delay” ordinance for buildings that were built before Dec. 7, 1941 — Pearl Harbor Day — but other, newer ones play into the feeling of Nashville, too. Of the downtown properties in the auction, Lawrence’s Quintessence Gallery, the Old Ferguson House and the Bartley House would be historic based on age. However, the most the council could do now to protect even a historic building would be to issue a fine if it was demolished before a mandatory waiting period was up.

This is why the Peaceful Valley Heritage society approached the town council years ago, knowing that the Rogers properties wouldn’t be under Andy’s care forever, said society member Jim Schultz.

The town council and the Nashville Development Review Commission have gone through at least seven drafts of a new preservation ordinance over the past year. So far, none of them has passed. Gore said she intends to try again next month.

There’s a delicate balance to strike between preserving what’s here, maybe regardless of its condition and economic potential, and allowing change to happen, Lawrence said.

“Some of the old sheds, old dilapidated houses, the visitors came from the cities to the country to see all that, and now, sometimes, the old shed’s been torn down and a new one’s put in its place, and you can see those anywhere.

“It’s improvement, yes,” he said, “but you may have lost some of the eclectic qualities that the visitor was really kind of coming for.”

Forces at play

Earlier this month, the Nashville Redevelopment Commission briefly discussed incentives it could deploy to help people invest in Nashville.

All of Rogers’ downtown properties are eligible for tax-increment financing, or TIF, which is a way of capturing tax revenue to help a landowner or the town pay for improvements to a property or an economic development area. They also could be eligible for tax abatement, a period of zero or reduced property taxes.

The RDC made no blanket commitments to use those incentives; they are considered on a case-by-case basis.

Gore, a longtime real estate agent in Nashville, is concerned about the effect of so many properties hitting the commercial real estate market here at once.

“It’s kept me up at night worrying about what’s going to happen,” she told the RDC. “The greatest fear I would have in the real estate market is when that many properties go on the market at one time. We haven’t had business properties on the market, or minimal, since I’ve lived here, and I’ve been here 43 years.”

Tim Ellis, who’s organizing the auction with Jimmie Dean Coffey, believes the auction could have an upward effect on commercial property values throughout town, as sometimes, an auction commands a higher price than a private sale would.

Property sale prices can factor into property assessment for tax purposes, and the assessed value of property in town has an effect on property taxes. Usually, a higher overall assessed value means a lower tax rate.

Schultz believes the new Brown County Music Center being open is going to “reset the property values around here.” Without that, and with the influx of sale properties, “I think it would be a different story,” he said.

Despite the uneasiness floating about town, Franklin is hopeful that the “spirit of Brown County” will prevail.

“I’m not old enough to retire, so I’m going to fight for it for a good amount of time. But I don’t somehow feel that I need to fight right now. I feel a very good calmness, because we’re all working together,” she said about her neighbors.

“The shops that have been here for a long time, like the nut shop, and the Lawrence brothers, we are the town to those people. Everybody goes to the nut shop and snacks around, and his (Marc’s) dad was there and he’s such a town character, and Marc’s sort of a town character, and the Lawrences are always full of stories and creativity, and John Mills used to be part of that, too. That’s what Brown County’s about. And even if I don’t have creativity and I’m not that much of a character, I do think our shop adds value to the town.”

Next to her, a customer chatted at the counter while she shopped for a ring, talking about how her mother, age 64, had jewelry from this store, too.

Like the ever-changing stoplight at the corner, the cycle continued.

“Ultimately, the visitor decides what remains here,” Lawrence said. “They’re voting with their dollars. It’s free enterprise. Ultimately, they decide what the environment is going to be.”