There is a little shop on the corner of Fifth Street and Cardigan Avenue that transports you back in time as you browse the shelves for a neat trinket or storied curio to add to your collection. It’s known as Yeoman’s Antiques, and it’s owned by a wonderful woman named Jane Yeoman. She knows everything about each item on sale in her shop, and she can speak for hours about their history and how they came to be in her possession.

You see, Jane doesn’t just get her wares delivered to her shop like other outlets—she spends countless hours scouring the country to procure antiques that have a meaningful past. There’s an old oak desk you’ll see to your left as soon as you walk through her door. It once belonged to the venerated author and poet, Edgar Allan Poe. Jane had to make a trip to a small town outside Baltimore, where it was up for auction at an estate sale. Now, you can write your own tales of macabre tragedies on the same desk that Poe jotted down the first draft of “The Raven” for only $79,000!

In addition to Poe’s old desk, Jane possesses a cutting board that belonged to Sir William Edmund Goodenough, an Admiral in the Royal Navy during World War I; a wicker chair owned by feminist author Lois Gould; a washboard used by a poor family of migrant workers during the Dust Bowl; and some of the navigational charts from the Golden Hind, one of the surviving ships used by Sir Francis Drake when he circumnavigated the globe.

The items you can find in Yeoman’s Antiques are as impressive to behold as they are expensive to buy. That’s the thing about Jane’s shop—the price tags have numbers far beyond what most Emerson Valley residents would dare to pay for an artifact of a bygone age. But that’s just how Jane likes it. According to her, the precious antiques for sale in her shop are really presented more like a museum, and she’s loathe to part with any of them.

You might be asking why she doesn’t just convert her store into a proper museum, and you would be far from the first to ask that question. The answer lies in the inefficient idiosyncrasies of our local government. Due to zoning laws and the thick red tape of City Hall, Jane is unable to get a permit to operate a museum in the space she owns at the corner of Fifth and Cardigan. Even though it’s located downtown, it’s technically in a residential area.

Jane can’t even purchase a new lot in town to build a museum in an acceptable location, because museums have somehow ended up on the list of things deemed unacceptable. This is the kind of thing that was enshrined in our town’s laws many years ago, for reasons known only to those alive at the time. And every successive City Council administration has refused to change it.

The process of overturning a law is apparently so long, tedious, and unnecessarily complicated that even if a City Council member were to propose the law be changed, it wouldn’t be worth the time and effort to see it all the way through. The Gazette spoke to City Councilor Lynn Fitzgerald to learn more about this issue.

“Emerson Valley has a very complex form of municipal government that makes it hard to change laws that have already been enacted,” she explained. “It would be more efficient to propose the law be stricken from the books, then propose a brand new law to replace it. While I feel for Ms. Yeoman’s predicament, it would be a waste of city resources to go through all that just for one person.”

Ultimately, Jane isn’t too bothered by her situation. She enjoys showing people around her shop and detailing the history of the things on her shelves to anyone that wanders into Yeoman’s Antiques. Whether you want to learn something interesting or are actually willing to drop a minor fortune on an item from Jane’s collection, you are guaranteed to have a good time.

-William Cooper, Human Interest, Emerson Valley Gazette