Discovering Madison Buy Sell Trade: Where Everything Has a Story

11 minutes ago

8 min read

Photo Credit to Brian Guetig

Before you ever step through the doors of Madison Buy Sell Trade, the storytelling has already begun. Outside, a board chronicles the supposed history of the store, a collection of remarkable facts, historic firsts, and extraordinary tales. It is an impressive history.

It is also almost entirely fabricated.

But perhaps that is fitting.

Every good story benefits from a little folklore, a touch of exaggeration, and just enough absurdity to leave you wondering where the truth ends and the legend begins. And once you step through the doors at 303 West Main Street, even the most outlandish stories suddenly don't seem quite so impossible.

You are greeted by taxidermied bears, an old funeral lamp, cases overflowing with coins and jewelry, toys and comic books, musical instruments, antiques, and objects you may not immediately be able to identify. Then there are the employees themselves—a cast of characters every bit as eclectic and interesting as the things surrounding them.

Stand in one place long enough, and you can seemingly look backward through time. Something manufactured last year may sit only a few feet from a relic of the 2010s, the 2000s, the '90s or '80s. Look a little farther, and you may find yourself staring at something from the 1800s. Nearly two centuries of American life can occupy the same field of view.

There is a sense of wonder to Madison Buy Sell Trade—a feeling that somewhere among the crowded shelves, overflowing display cases, forgotten objects, and familiar pieces of childhood is something waiting specifically for you to notice it.

Photo Credit to Brian Guetig

Walk through the doors and the question quickly stops being: What do they sell here?

A better question is:

What might I find?

Everything—and Then Some

“Everything” is store manager Dashawn Kelley’s simple answer when asked what Madison Buy Sell Trade buys, sells, and trades.

Spend a few minutes looking around and it is difficult to argue with him.

Coins and precious metals share space with Pokémon cards and comic books. Fine jewelry sits within sight of vintage toys, video games, guitars, records, antiques, and objects that defy easy categorization. The inventory changes every time someone walks through the door carrying something new.

Kelley seems particularly well suited to preside over such a place. His own background is almost as varied as the shelves around him, with experience ranging from furniture restoration and mortuary science to acting and professional wrestling. He has been part of Madison Buy Sell Trade since the Madison store opened and today serves as its manager.

In another store, that résumé might seem unusual.

Here, somehow, it makes perfect sense.

A Childhood Collection Becomes a Business

The story of Madison Buy Sell Trade begins decades before the current storefront and, like many of the objects inside it, begins with a kid who simply found something fascinating.

Owner Shawn Coghill started collecting cards and cars as a child. His father encouraged the interest, helping him set up tables at shows and markets where collecting gradually became buying, selling, trading—and learning.

By 1987, that childhood fascination had become a business.

Over the decades that followed, Coghill's operation expanded to three stores in Madison, North Vernon, and Columbus before eventually consolidating in Madison.

It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate home.

Madison sits between Cincinnati, Louisville, and Indianapolis, making it accessible to collectors throughout the region. But geography is only part of the explanation.

This is, after all, Madison—a community where people preserve old buildings, restore old houses, drive old cars, collect old photographs, tell old stories, and wander through antique shops searching for something they didn't know they needed.

A store built around the idea that old things still have value seems perfectly at home here.

After operating businesses under other names, Coghill eventually settled on perhaps the most straightforward name imaginable.

Madison Buy Sell Trade.

They buy things.

They sell things.

They trade things.

Almost everything else about the place is considerably harder to explain.

What Is It Worth?

Every object that comes through the door carries at least two questions:

What is it?

And:

What is it worth?

Photo Credit to Brian Guetig

Madison Buy Sell Trade uses publicly available valuation resources, specialized subscription services, recent sales information, and other market data. But databases can only tell you so much.

There is another resource that can't be purchased with a subscription: nearly four decades of experience.

Coghill's lifetime in the collectibles business, combined with the knowledge of Kelley and the rest of the staff, has created an accumulated memory of thousands upon thousands of objects that have passed through their hands.

And occasionally, something walks through the door that surprises even them.

Kelley remembers a mammoth tusk.

There have been human teeth.

Even a human thigh bone.

One especially curious object was a nightclub ticket connected to Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In most businesses, a human bone, a mammoth tusk, or a relic connected to one of the most infamous moments in American history would become the story employees told for years.

At Madison Buy Sell Trade, they are simply a few of the things that have wandered through the door.

When Treasure Really Is Treasure

Strange doesn't necessarily mean valuable.

And ordinary doesn't necessarily mean worthless.

Kelley recalls comic books valued around $10,000, along with numerous other high-value objects that have passed through the store. Sometimes customers know exactly what they possess. Other times, they have little idea.

There have been occasions when someone has brought in an item asking considerably less than its actual value. More remarkably, Kelley says there have been instances when the store purchased something, continued researching it after the transaction, and discovered it was worth more than initially believed.

The sale was already complete.

They could have accepted their good fortune.

Instead, Madison Buy Sell Trade has contacted sellers and given them additional money.

That says something important about a business built around assigning dollar values to other people's possessions.

Because the objects arriving here aren't always just things.

Sometimes it is Grandpa's watch. A box of cards untouched for decades. A piece of jewelry inherited from a mother. A comic book purchased by a child for pocket change and somehow preserved into adulthood.

The monetary value may be discovered at the counter.

The personal value often arrived with it.

From Madison to Pawn Stars

Occasionally, the journey of an object doesn't end at 303 West Main Street.

After responding to an open casting call for the History Channel's Pawn Stars, Coghill traveled west with Madison Buy Sell Trade employee Robert Reynolds and several items from the store.

Photo Credit to Brian Guetig

Reynolds brought an interesting history of his own. Before becoming part of the Madison Buy Sell Trade cast of characters, he was the bassist for the Grammy-winning country band The Mavericks and was formerly married to country artist Trisha Yearwood.

From country music stages to a collectibles store in Madison, Indiana, to Pawn Stars.

Again, in most places that would sound improbable.

Here, it somehow fits.

Ultimately, a deal couldn't be reached, and the items returned to Indiana.

Another journey. Another story.

From Main Street to the World

Today, objects entering Madison Buy Sell Trade regularly travel much farther.

Online sales through platforms such as eBay and Whatnot have opened the store to collectors far beyond Southern Indiana. That's particularly important for unusual collectibles. There may not be anyone in Madison searching for a particular obscure comic, rare toy, vintage watch, or peculiar piece of memorabilia.

Somewhere, however, there probably is.

Something carried through the front door on West Main Street can eventually find the collector who has been searching for it thousands of miles away.

Yet the internet cannot reproduce the experience of walking through the store and discovering something you weren't looking for.

Because Madison Buy Sell Trade isn't simply about acquiring things.

It is about finding them.

Finding Your Own Past

Walk through the store with three generations of a family and each may see a completely different place.

A child may spot Pokémon cards, action figures, comics, or games.

Their parents may suddenly stop at something they haven't thought about in thirty years—a childhood toy, an old video game, a record, or some forgotten piece of the 1980s or '90s that instantly transports them backward in time.

A grandparent may find something older still: jewelry, coins, antiques, tools, or objects carrying memories from another generation.

They are all standing in the same store.

They are simply looking into different periods of their lives.

That may be one of the quiet pleasures of Madison Buy Sell Trade. The store doesn't organize nostalgia by generation.

It piles the decades together and lets you stumble across your own.

The Characters Behind the Counter

Of course, a store this unusual was probably never going to be staffed by ordinary characters.

The personalities behind the counter have become part of Madison Buy Sell Trade's identity. Their interests are broad, their backgrounds eclectic, and the humor of the place is difficult to miss.

At one point, that personality couldn't even be contained inside the store.

Madison Buy Sell Trade created its own podcast, Madison Babble • Scuttlebutt • Talk, where conversations wandered through pop culture, movies, history, comics, and the strange stories that naturally accumulate when you spend your days surrounded by other people's treasures.

In a sense, the podcast was simply an extension of what happens across the counter every day.

Someone brings in an object.

Someone recognizes it.

A conversation begins.

And before long, someone is telling a story.

Everything Is for Sale

Perhaps the greatest contradiction at Madison Buy Sell Trade is Coghill himself.

The business exists because a young boy loved collecting.

Nearly four decades later, that boy has spent much of his life surrounded by things collectors dream about owning.

Yet Coghill maintains no personal collection.

There is no secret room filled with treasures. No special shelf of objects that can never be purchased. No untouchable collection accumulated from a lifetime of having first choice among the thousands of remarkable things that have passed through his hands.

Everything is for sale.

Perhaps somewhere along the way, a collector can come to understand something about the nature of possessions:

We don't really own these things forever.

We simply hold onto them for a while.

Where Everything Has a Story

And perhaps that is the real wonder of Madison Buy Sell Trade.

Every morning the doors open and the collection changes.

Something leaves.

Something arrives.

An object that spent fifty years in one family's home appears on the counter. A forgotten box is opened. An old comic is recognized. A piece of jewelry finds a new owner. A childhood toy becomes someone else's discovery.

Some objects are worth a few dollars.

Some are worth thousands.

And some are valuable only because they make someone stop in the middle of the store, smile, and say:

I had one of those.

The fabricated history outside Madison Buy Sell Trade may not be true.

But after spending some time inside, you begin to understand why someone bothered inventing it.

Reality here hardly needs much help.

There really have been mammoth tusks and human bones. There really have been $10,000 comic books, Grammy-winning musicians, television appearances, objects from the nineteenth century sitting beside objects made last year, and countless forgotten things given another chance to be discovered.

At 303 West Main Street, history isn't arranged neatly behind museum glass.

It is crowded onto shelves, stacked in corners, locked inside display cases, hanging from walls, and waiting on counters.

And tomorrow, someone may walk through the door carrying something no one inside has ever seen before.

That is the promise of Madison Buy Sell Trade.

You never quite know what you will find.

You only know there will be a story behind it, and that you will become part of that story.

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