Estate Sale Set For Redding Home Of Folk Music Goddess

REDDING, CT — Many of the prized possessions of a folk music legend will see the light of day for the first time in over a decade at an estate sale in Redding this weekend.

The farmhouse at 70 Limekiln Road once belonged to Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary fame, and has been on the market for over two months, according to William Pitt and Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s International Realty. It has only recently gone to contract, and an estate sale is planned for Friday and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., both days.

Travers and her fourth husband, Ethan Robbins, were longtime Redding residents, until her 2009 death from complications from leukemia. She was 72.

With partners Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey, Travers played a huge part in the Greenwich Village folk music revival of the 1960s. The trio had a string of hits, interpreting songs by Bob Dylan ("Blowin' in the Wind") and Pete Seeger ("If I Had A Hammer"), and their own portfolio ("Puff, The Magic Dragon," "I Dig Rock and Roll Music"), among others.

Music fans may regard Travers' piano, or a 12-foot painting of the folk singer draped in an American flag by Polish expressionist painter Feliks Topolski, as the centerpiece of the estate sale. But Travers was also an ardent collector of African art, and the sale includes numerous artifacts and primitives from that set. Also up for grabs is fine china from Japan, Limoges and Pierre Cardin.

Visitors to the estate sale will be restricted to the great room and the kitchen. Outside and off limits are Travers' "secret gardens," where the singer found "beauty to behold in all directions with abundant perennial flowers and mature trees," according to the listing.