THREE RIVERS AREA — After sweeping flies away from her face, Debra House began rifling through a bin of brass plates. She explained that they were used to stamp the wooden crates that carried soda bottles, and the plates came from a soft-drink manufacturing facility that had closed.
Her father, Ralph Hosto, was a collector.
The outbuildings and pods surrounding the Hosto estate are filled with more things that one might see on History’s popular television show American Pickers.
“This is 83 years of collecting,” House said as she looked out over the vast, and overwhelming, amount of items.
When Hosto died in October, House and her sister, Susan Hosto, left their homes in Alabama and Texas, respectively, to come back to their childhood home temporarily to settle their father’s estate. The home has a Weiner address and a Grubbs telephone number, but it is a couple miles down a gravel road flanked by farmland just outside of Amagon in Jackson County.
A couple of crop dusters soared overhead - occasionally swooping down to spray the crops that were planted in the fields - as the sisters trudged through rows of petrified wood and precious stones near a table covered with bins of glass insulators.
House and Susan Hosto have been digging through their father’s collections since October, making his ongoing estate sale their full-time jobs. House said the auctioneers she’s talked to said this is the largest estate sale in the state, and it will run through this October.
“I’ve already sold 40,000 pounds of petrified wood,” House said. “We have counted up to 800 wood planers and thousands of hammers.”
She added that there are 3,100-boardfeet of black walnut that has been sitting in the shop for 37 years.
Ralph’s son-in-law Tommy Sitzer said he has hauled off at least one to two loads of steel each week since October.
Walking through the doors of a large metal building, Susan Hosto said she and her sister had to take a crash course in tools and had to study antiques to know exactly what they had.
“This was 9 feet high when we first came in here,” she said about the piles of items, such as shovels, turned wooden vessels and buttons.
“When the button plant in Diaz shut down, Dad bought all the pearl buttons and all the mussel shells they used to make them,” House said as she pulled out one of the shells from a barrel.
Many times, Ralph Hosto’s friends would stop by, letting him know exactly what they might need in the way of parts, and he usually had what they needed.
“It would save a trip to Weiner to the John Deere place,” House said. “Dad had so many things, and he didn’t have one of anything. He had hundreds or even thousands.”
Ralph and his wife, Doris, traveled the United States, Canada and Mexico picking up rocks and fossils. A hobby that began by collecting arrowheads blossomed into a museum. In 1968, Ralph constructed three metal buildings to house his museum. He raised soybeans, milo and rice on his farm, which is about 16 miles outside of Newport. A tornado blew through, taking two of the buildings with it, but Ralph rebuilt them.
The Hostos never charged for people to come through their museum, and the Chicago Museum of Natural History wrote to them saying their collection was considerably valuable and of scientific interest. The collection consists of shark teeth, woolly mammoth teeth, fossilized shark feces and multitudes of fossils, including a 62-inch cephalopod that House said is estimated at 500million years old. House said the Smithsonian Institution has asked the Hosto family to donate the cephalopod, but she wouldn’t comment on the fate of the fossil.
“We believe in sharing our discoveries with others,” Doris said in a Jan. 16, 1972, article in the Arkansas Gazette. “That’s why we’ll never charge an admission fee.”
The couple had been married 58 years when Doris died in 2009.
Sales at the farm will be held the first Friday and Saturday of each month through October. Visit the auction website atodomauction.net for directions, times and photos.
Staff writer Jeanni Brosiuscan be reached at (501) 244-4307 or jbrosius@arkansasonline.com.
Three Rivers, Pages 119 on 05/27/2012