By Gordon Dritschilo
THE RUTLAND HERALD
An unidentified vendor at a gun show at the Vermont State Fairgrounds has been sharply criticized by the Rutland branch of the NAACP for displaying what appear to be replicas of shackles connected to slavery.
The organization issued a statement this week after a person who attended the gun show held Aug. 13-14 sent them a photo of what appeared to be pre-Civil War era shackles. The shackles bore two inscriptions, one reading, “Negro woman or child only” and the other “Property of George Town County Plantation Police.”
“While items like these may be considered antique collectibles, careful consideration must be taken when displaying tools and weapons used in the oppression, torture and captivity of Black peoples,” the NAACP statement reads. “It is important to learn about and recognize the horrors of the legacy of slavery, and so we must not perpetuate profiting from the relics.”
Such items, the statement said, should be kept in museums and similar institutions.
“One of the ways that racism continues to infiltrate our everyday life is by not being conscientious of history in a way that is productive,” the statement reads. “Though it is not against the law to sell these items, we also know that change starts from individuals and organizations that are willing to stop the harm. One of the ways that we can move forward as a nation, a state, and a city is to ensure that we are intentional about where the history of hate is displayed.”
The show was organized by Mechanicville, New York, gun dealer David Petronis, who has put on several such events at the fairgrounds.
Petronis did not disclose the name of the vendor in question — only that he was from Connecticut — but said Thursday that he spoke with the dealer and told him not to display the shackles at any future shows of his.
“He had a lot of stuff — bayonets and swords and knives and toy soldiers,” he said. “He was an antiques dealer.”
Petronis acknowledged that displaying the shackles with the inscriptions was “a little insensitive.”
“If I’d seen them, I would have asked him not to show them,” he said. “They were just kind of haphazardly thrown into a bin, and I think that was the problem for the people that saw it. It wasn’t labeled as a sensitive item. I understand that, I really do.”
Petronis said it is not unusual for gun show vendors to sell items like Confederate or Nazi artifacts, and that those items need to be treated with the respect demanded by the weight of the history behind them.
However, there may not be any genuine history behind the shackles except the history of forgery in the antiques business. A Google search turned up no records of any “George Town County Plantation Police,” and the only references to such an organization that could be found were in either news accounts of seemingly identical pairs of shackles to the ones at the gun show offending people — once when they were offered for sale at a Philadelphia pawn shop in 2012, and again when a vendor was selling them at the 2017 Parke County Covered Bridge Festival in Indiana.
Listings for shackles just like the ones at the gun show turn up on several auction websites. In some, they are explicitly designated as “fake.” Online antiquing forums contain several discussions about how most of the “slave tags” offered for sale online and at antiques shows are forgeries. A 2017 piece published on antiquesandauctionnews.net stated that such items are frequently forged and tags marked with locations other than Charleston or Charleston Neck are always fakes.
Robert Congdon, president of the Rutland County Agricultural Society, which owns the fairgrounds, noted that the show was an outside event and that the fair association’s only involvement was to rent the organizers a building. He said he was encouraged to hear that Petronis had told the vendor not to display such items at future shows.
“The fair board has agreed, after the fair, to have an internal review, have a look at our policies and see what happened,” he said. “We will address issues as they need to be.”
Rutland Area NAACP Mia Schultz did not immediately respond to an inquiry Thursday.
gordon.dritschilo @rutlandherald.com
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