About The Oldest Auction House In America
In 2025, the company celebrated its 220th anniversary and rebranded
An auction house is a company or organization that facilitates the public sale of goods to the highest bidder. It acts as an intermediary between sellers (who consign items for sale) and buyers (who compete against one another by placing increasingly higher bids). The item is sold to whoever offers the most money — hence the phrase "going once, going twice, sold."
America's oldest auction house is Freeman's (now operating as Freeman's | Hindman or rebranded as Freeman’s Auctions and Appraisals) was founded in 1805 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Barnebys Group describes it as America’s oldest auction house. Stonehage Fleming defines it as America’s oldest auction house. Freeman’s is self described as America’s oldest auction house. It predates Sotheby's and Christie's in terms of U.S. operations, and holds the title of the longest continuously operating auction house in the country.
Tristram Bampfylde Freeman, a British print seller and former printer to King George III (who had faced bankruptcies in London), emigrated to Philadelphia in 1795. He initially worked as a printer and began conducting informal sales of real estate and merchandise at the Merchant’s Coffee House, a hub of business and politics in the young nation.
On November 12, 1805, Pennsylvania Governor Thomas McKean officially appointed him as an auctioneer, granting a 17-year monopoly on public auctioneering in Philadelphia.
The first documented auction occurred on November 26, 1805, at a Philadelphia coffee house: Freeman hammered down two bales of “superfine and common cloths” along with other textile lots imported through the port. Early business focused on dry goods, woolens, commodities, real estate, and even entire vessels (ships sold “from topsail to keel”).
The firm started small but grew with Philadelphia's role as a major port and commercial center. It handled a wide range of merchandise and expanded into books (regular sales from 1824). The company remained in the Freeman family for six generations, making it one of America's earliest family-owned businesses.
For its first 150 years, Freeman's emphasized high-volume sales of real estate, industrial goods, and commodities rather than fine art alone. In the 1880s, it sold the Philadelphia Post Office building for a record $425,000 at the time.
During and after World War I, it managed massive wool surplus sales (one year totaling $350 million in 1919-era dollars). It even auctioned the entire gunpowder industry town of Nitro, West Virginia, in 1922, the largest sale in its history up to that point, before auctioning four battleships following the Treaty of Versailles in 1924. During the Great Depression, it sold mills as industries shifted.
Freeman's stayed family-owned until 2016, when the Freeman family sold it to a private partnership (associated with the UK auction house Lyon & Turnbull, with which it had a marketing alliance since 2000). Samuel M. “Beau” Freeman II (sixth-generation leader) remained involved until his death in 2017.
In 2019, Chicago-based Leslie Hindman Auctioneers (founded 1982) merged with Cincinnati’s Cowan’s Auctions (founded 1995, known for Americana and with ties to Antiques Roadshow) to form Hindman Auctions.
In January 2024, Freeman's merged with Hindman to create Freeman's | Hindman, combining Freeman's 219+ years of history with Hindman's expertise and regional network. This created one of the largest coast-to-coast presences for a U.S. auction house, with headquarters now in Chicago and a new saleroom/gallery opened at 32 East 67th Street on New York’s Upper East Side.
In 2025, the company celebrated its 220th anniversary and rebranded as Freeman’s Auctions and Appraisals, emphasizing its role as “America’s Auction House” with a focus on connecting local collectors to the global market.
Freeman's is distinctly American in origin and continuity. It has witnessed and participated in U.S. history, from early republic commerce and the Industrial Revolution to world wars, the Depression, and the rise of the modern art market.