Tax bill could mean the end for this historic shop
Taxes quadrupled after most recent assessment
MORGANSTON — Ray Cobbing's antique store is located at a quiet crossroads in Northumberland County. It's an old building, dating back to the 19th century, and looks it, with a classic storefront, a wide veranda, large windows and a cozy brick cottage attached.
Travellers and treasure hunters stop in and look around the shop, browsing fine china, furniture, old books and records and artwork. Cobbing chats with them as he rings up sales on a huge century-old cash register.
“Thanks for visiting my museum,” he says to one couple. And it is a bit of a museum – much of his stock comes from area estates, representing little moments from the early years of the county and its tiny communities.
The shop, located just south of Warkworth, is full of history, but that may soon come to an end. Cobbing's annual taxes just leaped from roughly $3,000 to more than $12,000, all due to a Municipal Property Assessment Corp. (MPAC) assessment he says is faulty.
“Does this place look like I should be paying $12,000 a year in taxes?” he asks.
Ray Cobbing Antiques is the only business at the crossroads of Morganston Road and County Road 25, and one of only a handful of buildings in Morganston itself. A few homes, a closeddown church, a cemetery … there isn't much to this little hamlet, known as Snyder's Corners before 1868.
But that suits Cobbing, 80, fine, and it has for decades. He was running an antique store in Menie, near Campbellford, when he came to an estate auction here in 1979. The store and post office were built and opened by R.S. Newman in 1867. He sold the property to John Anderson in 1891, and it operated for decades, but by the time Cobbing came along, the store and post office had closed down, and the building and contents were for sale.
Cobbing and Suzzanne Hubbs bought the old store and house, relocated to Morganston and got married under a willow tree on the property. They moved into the adjoining home, raised their family there.
“We liked the idea of walking through the kitchen door and into the business,” he says.
They kept the shop much as it was when it was a mercantile/ post office. The village mailboxes are still there, with family names written under the boxes in 19thcentury script. The adjoining house, where Cobbing lives, still has some of the antique furniture that came with it.
Cobbing, a widower, now runs the business himself. After decades on the road visiting antique shows, he now spends most of his time at the shop.
The building is not in good shape. There's obvious structural damage, the result of age, the elements and, Cobbing suspects, roadwork.
Morganston Road, which runs along the north side of the building, has been raised and widened over the years; Old photos of the mercantile show several steps up to the veranda, which is today almost level with the pavement.
That roadwork, he says, caused the building's foundation to shift over the decades. Nothing is quite level. The second floor of the shop isn't usable. There's a caved-in section at the back of the store building, the sun shining through its collapsed roof.
The general condition of the building has Cobbing wondering how his assessment could have increased by so much when the building's condition worsens each year.
That $9,000 annual increase is impossible for him to meet, he says. “I'm not getting rich from this,” he says. “With the ($3,000) taxes, I was fine. But if I have to pay $12,000, well, I'll have to close.”
He's reached out to Cramahe Township, and heard back from Mayor Marc Coombs, who expressed his support for small businesses like Cobbing's via email. But there's little anyone at the township offices can do, Cobbings acknowledges, unless MPAC reverses itself.
An MPAC inspector visited the site recently and Cobbing's case is under review, an MPAC spokesperson confirmed via email. The process is called Request for Reconsideration; if a change is made, MPAC will notify the Township of Cramahe and Cobbing's tax bill would be adjusted.
Cobbing hopes that happens. Otherwise, he's calling it quits.
He's talking about this while sitting on his front porch. He's a natural storyteller, like most lovers of history and antiques, but most of his reminiscing isn't about the antiques themselves.
“The best thing about this,” he explains, “is the people who come through that door.”
A driver passes, honks and waves. “That fellow,” Cobbing says, “just the other day stopped and offered to help out with repairs in the back. It's a wonderful little community.”
Cobbing grew up in Warkworth, moving there from England with his parents when he was 15, and remembers passing the shop along what was then a dirt road during his early days as a truck driver.
He's now lived at the Morganston crossroads for almost 40 years, and he doesn't want to move on.
“I've got everything here that I want,” he says, digging out old flyers about Antiques Roadshow-style events to raise funds for community causes. “This is home. I like it here. And I think we've given a lot back to the community, as well.”
He sees small-town antique stores as vital to rural areas. Many of the families still farming in the area can find their family names on those post office boxes.