When David Patterson and his father-in-law Charles Cle-ments started Northgate Gallery, Inc. in 1968, neither could have imagined their small, local business would one day be catering to clients from all over the world. Northgate Gallery is one of the oldest auction and antique companies in Tennessee, as proof by their firm license of No. 16 out of currently 3,671 issued and Patterson’s state auctioneer license No. 101 out of currently 4,838 on record.
Before antiques, Patterson attended Red Bank High School and was the co-captain of the football team. His freshman year of college he went to Tennessee Technical University and then transferred to Carson Newman College, where he had a football scholarship. He graduated from there in 1961 and attended UT law school until graduating in December of 1963. Patterson passed the bar exam and went into practice with Spears, Moore, Rebman & Williams, and practiced law with them for about a year.
At that point, Clements, who owned Clements Antiques, persuaded Patterson to come into business with him, a hard decision to make, Patterson recounts. Patterson and Clements continued to work together for about 20 years at the business they established, Northgate Gallery, until they split the business in 1984 and Patterson and his wife continued managing the Chattanooga store.
Patterson says that dealing in antiques is very different from practicing law, but his law degree has come in very handy with the business from within various transactions to contracts. Patterson says he always had a love of antiques, and collected
even before he married a wife who had been raised in an antique seller’s family.
“It kind of grew on us continually, you might say,” Patterson says.
Patterson lost his wife in 2002 to cancer, but his daughter and son-in-law have continued with the family business since then in opening an antique business in Brentwood, Tenn., where they have 22,000 square feet of space.
Northgate Gallery holds auctions almost every five weeks. Typical auctions feature around 450 pieces, and goes from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday. Customers can preview items that will be featured within the auction the day and week before.
For the next auction they are having on August 6 at the gallery, they gather their items by liquidating estates, collections, or bankruptcies; getting consignments from different places throughout the Southeast; and importing items from all across Europe. With Patterson’s many years in the business, now his oldest customers are beginning to size down into smaller residences or nursing homes, and he helps them with their items as well.
“We will go in and take the entire contents of a house if it’s the type of things we can sell,” he says. “We go in and inventory it, move it with our own staff and we advertise it, conduct an auction on it and send in the proceeds minus our commission.”
In addition to being a real estate broker that can liquidate the items within a house for sale as well as sell the estate itself, Patterson does appraisal work. He’s in the American Appraisal Society and has passed the Uniform Standards of Appraisal Practice, one of the few appraisers in this area wh0 has completed that course and passed that examination, he says.
“If a person wants something sold or liquidated quickly, it’s a fairly quick process with us. Whereas you can put stuff on Ebay and it may sell next week or be on there for three months,” Patterson says. “We try to provide a service and a quality auction where people can liquidate things here in the South without having to take it to New York or Philadelphia or Dallas or some place like that.” Northgate Gallery publishes and distributes about 6,000 brochures for every auction. Patterson says they do spend more on advertising than most companies, and try to do a really good job of promoting the sale.
The advertising seems to work, too, considering the longevity of the company as well as the recent 19th century coin silver ewer that was presented by the Whig Party of Philadelphia to Tennessee Governor James C. Jones in 1843, and was the cover art of the last brochure and sold to the Tennessee State Museum. Patterson says the Internet has changed the antique business substantially. They use a service called Artifact based out of London to post each of their auction items on this site so that those who register with the site can see those items and bid on their computer during the live auction. Patterson then ships the items to all parts of the world. Some items from the last auction were sent to China, and previous auctions have shipped sold items to Moscow, England, Belgium and other parts of the world.
“Through Artifact, a lot of European, and even people from China can view our items,” Patterson says. “We think it’s one of the best systems, and has a large database where we can go into it and research our items and find what an artist’s work has sold for over the last 20 years and get a comparison value for today’s market.”
Patterson has several pieces he has found over the years that he has collected for his own home, and he, his daughter and his son-in-law all like looking for a certain piece of furniture in both French and American styles, he says.
This global, local, family, community business remains strong after more than 50 years offering customers their monthly auctions in addition to a beautifully laid out showroom on the bottom floor where they sell from as well to individuals and dealers.
To view all of the items in an auction, visit www.northgateauctions.com. For the sale of an estate, contact Patterson at 423-877-6114.