It’s Wednesday at nine o’clock on a sweltering August morning at Dixon’s Auction in Crumpton, Maryland. Men wearing faded jeans and T-shirts accompanied by women sporting shorts and heat-wrinkled blouses mill around artifa”cts of Americana blanketing a large field. They peek inside old furniture drawers, poke through boxes of tarnished silverware, and test the hinges of cabinet doors, never straying far from the singsong litany emanating from an oversized golf cart that slowly nudges them along rows upon rows of stuff like a motorized sheepdog.
