On the west side of the square in downtown Tipton, Iowa, Ms. Molly’s Antiques and Collectibles has been trading in secondhand treasures since it opened in October 2004, when its founders, Blair and Ms. Molly, first put a lifetime personal collection built up over more than forty years out for sale. What began as a single owner’s accumulation has since grown into a proper multi-vendor shop at 421 Cedar Street, where roughly nine resident dealers now fill the space with furniture, glassware, and collectibles under booth names like Babbles and Bling, Cedar Street Collectables, Cedar Street Treasure, Pit Stop Guy, Pitch and Hit Collectibles, R.B.’s Reasonable Buys, and Uncle Warren’s Cabin Collectibles, alongside Ms. Molly’s own booth. The shop’s tagline sums up the approach nicely: I may be small but I have it all on the west side of the square, a fitting description for a compact storefront that packs in a wide range of antique furniture and glassware at what the owners call fair prices.
The move to the current Cedar Street location also brought room to grow in an unexpected direction. Upstairs, Ms. Molly’s operates the Cedar County Attic Museum, a display space that gives the shop a small-museum feel on top of its retail floor, something few antique stores in small-town Iowa can offer. Downstairs, the retail area was enlarged from the shop’s original home at 615 Crestview Drive, giving dealers more room to display furniture pieces that would otherwise be hard to fit into a cramped storefront. One of the vendors, Miss Nellie’s Fiber and Wheels, brings a niche not often found in a general antiques mall: Ms. Molly’s carries Ashford spinning wheels, spinning products, and fiber supplies, appealing to a crossover crowd of collectors and fiber artists who might not otherwise wander into an antique shop.
A specialty that has long set Ms. Molly’s apart from other antique dealers in Cedar County is chair caning, a restoration skill the shop’s owners describe as genuinely hard to find these days. Rather than sending a damaged cane-seat chair off to a specialist out of state, customers in the Tipton area can bring the piece in directly, and the shop offers the service at reasonable rates with a relatively quick turnaround. For anyone holding onto an heirloom chair with a sagging or broken cane seat, that kind of hands-on restoration work is a real point of difference from shops that only buy and sell without offering any repair services at all. Ms. Molly’s also runs an eBay storefront called Cedar Street Treasures, extending the shop’s reach well beyond foot traffic in downtown Tipton to collectors browsing online from anywhere in the country.
The shop keeps a modest, predictable schedule built around a small town’s rhythm, open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon, and closed Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and holidays, so visitors planning a trip to the square should check those days before making the drive. Tipton itself, the Cedar County seat, is a quiet stop for antique hunters working a circuit through eastern Iowa, and Ms. Molly’s gives them a reason to linger with its mix of dealer booths, an attic museum, spinning and fiber goods, and one of the few chair caning services still operating in the region. Ms. Molly’s Antiques and Collectibles is, in short, a family-run, multi-vendor antique shop in downtown Tipton, Iowa, offering furniture, glassware, fiber arts supplies, an upstairs museum, and chair caning repair all under one roof on the west side of the square.
