Essex gains a musical haven, complete with vintage guitars

Pawn 22 is a musical sanctuary hiding in plain sight

By Tim Rowland

Three guitars rest on stands, silent, waiting to be brought to life. 

Persian carpets blanket the floor. The room, not exactly large, not exactly small, is painted oxblood red, glowing warmly in the amber light of 300-year-old ceiling lanterns from the Black Sea coast.

People come to this space just south of Whallonsburg, near the shores of Lake Champlain, to play, record and listen to music, but even nonmusical types who would not know a Fender from a fireplug cannot help but gawk at walls filled with vintage stringed instruments and bask in an era when music was something more than an app on a phone.

The ambiance of the room is important, said Eric Sherman, who designed and built 22 Pawn as an unlikely addition to Champlain Peony Co., a nursery, and 22 Brew, a coffee shop, businesses more in line with what one might expect to see rising from these former farm fields. 

Sherman’s brother Will is a physician and horticulturist, whose bare-root peonies are shipped around the world in the more traditional side of the business. As another incentive to stop, the brothers bought the best coffee machine made, and began to assemble an eye-catching collection of classic cars.

An unspoken allure

But 22 Pawn makes up in imagination what it lacks in commercial expediency. “It has a feel to it,” Eric Sherman said. “Almost primal.”

A builder and Great Camp caretaker, Sherman assigned meaning to every detail. The sunken floor that gives it an embracing, clubby atmosphere is inspired by the sunken living room in Great Camp To-No-Na. The blue exterior is the color of Amish workshirts, a tip of the cap to master builder Reuben Swartzentruber and his crew.

22 Pawn has no signs, scant advertising, and yet somehow musicians keep finding it with bat-like radar that unfailingly draws them in. The coffee shop is an innocent little piece of cheese for northbound travelers who naively think they are on schedule to grab a quick cup of Joe and hop the next ferry out of Essex to Charlotte, Vermont—a game plan that takes a left turn when they find their noses pressed against the glass of 22 Pawn, peering at rows of vintage guitars, many better than a half-century old.

If Sherman is walking by at the time, he’ll offer to unlock the door for a little tour, at which point time ceases to matter.

That was the case when Bob Weir, founder of the Grateful Dead, paid a visit. It is what happened to alt-country artist Griffin William Sherry. His band was on its way to do a sound check at Higher Ground in Vermont, when a random coffee stop caused them to miss three consecutive ferries.

‘The guitars kept coming’

“People come from all over the place. Usually they’re on their way from the Northway to Vermont,” said Sherman’s son Tom, who is kind of responsible for this whole thing because as a kid he and his brother Adam asked for Legos and guitars for Christmas. “The Legos went away after a while, but the guitars kept coming,” Eric Sherman said.

When Eric Sherman was working for the Trudeau Institute in Saranac Lake, Tom began hanging around the Ampersound guitar shop in town, learning under the tutelage of Ron Keyes and Mark Coleman. “They helped get us started,” Tom Sherman said. “And I always had an affinity for messing around with professional-level equipment.”

Tom Sherman’s workbench is situated in 22 Pawn as well, bristling with cords, wires, capacitors, jacks and tubes that would have made perfect sense to shaggy-haired, Radio Shack-loving teens in the ’70s.

Watch musician Ralph Lane play three classic guitars at 22 Pawn. Video by Eric Teed

Tom Sherman refurbishes old guitars that have had better days, and as word has gotten around, old musicians or their families have dropped off battered instruments to be restored and take their place on 22 Pawn’s walls. In keeping with the name, guitars can be bought, sold or traded—reluctantly. “We’re never in a big hurry to see a guitar go out the door,” Eric Sherman said. Some bring their guitars to 22 Pawn for safekeeping or to honor a beloved instrument whose owner no longer plays or has passed on.

Artists use the room almost as a movie set, recording sound video in a memorable backdrop. At the moment, there is no regularly scheduled live music, but there is an email list—add your name and next time there is a jam session you’ll be notified. The first 30 people who respond are in.

A place to jam

“If I’d known it would be this popular I would have built it bigger,” Sherman said. By happy accident, the dimensions of the room and the black, spray-foamed ceiling are conducive to great sound, which in turn lures great musicians.

One of them is Ralph Lane, a legendary Adirondack guitar virtuoso from Crown Point, who is sitting on an ancient metal step-stool getting ready to take the three earlier-referenced guitars for a spin. A master guitar restorer, Lane has scaled back his structured public performances, but he still jams now and again, and when he does word somehow gets around. Funny how, when Lane is in the house, people just “happen” to drop by.

RELATED READING: Ralph Lane: A guitar legend in the Eastern Adirondacks

On one of the guitar stands before him is a ’69 Fender Stratocaster, whose bright twang was the backbone of 20th-century country gold. Next to it is a high-octane Gibson Les Paul, descendant of the famed Goldtop, a blues/rock Ferrari used by the likes of Keith Richards and Eric Clapton. Definitely not for beginners.

“I like to take it in a blues direction, but if you play rock it can get loud,” Lane said, twisting a knob and rattling the furniture to prove the point.

Finally there are the rich, mellow jazzy chords of a Barney Kessel built by Kay, named for a member of the acclaimed Los Angeles session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew. Lane is enchanted with the Kay. “I don’t own this one,” he said, the word “yet” hanging unspoken in the air.

Musical heritage

Lane began playing when he was 4, in a family that made up in musical talent what it lacked in financial resources. “There would be seven boys sleeping upstairs and we’d wait for our uncle to go to sleep and sneak into his room so we could play his guitar,” he said.

His parents played the honky tonks of the eastern Adirondacks, and Lane picked up what he could listening to Chet Atkins on a late-night AM radio and Roy Clark on the TV show “Hee Haw.” He would get halfway through learning a new song, “then I’d have to wait six months for the reruns,” he said.

WATCH: Ralph Lane demonstrates three classic guitars

The guitars leap to life in Lane’s hands, each of which he coddles and caresses before stepping on the gas. You need to get the feel of a guitar before kicking up your heels, Lane says. They sizzle, moan, scream, coo and sparkle, depending on the model and the player’s mood.

Lane is happy to play at 22 Pawn. Like others, “I was stunned when I first saw this room,” he said. “The atmosphere is not typical; it’s so refreshing.”

Lane has brought with him a couple of his own new acquisitions that will join the 22 Pawn fold, a couple of roughly ukulele-sized piccolo guitars, which despite their diminutive nature have a full-size sound. Lane got them cheap from a man who said he wanted to learn guitar but never did. He chose the tiny guitars because—wait for it—he lived in a tiny house. Everyone’s tickled by that story, as well as the softball-sized amp that came with the piccolo, and belts out some pretty big sound.

Eclectic collections

But the piccolo is not the strangest 22 Pawn instrument—that honor might go to a handmade dobro, fashioned out of a roasting pan, a strap hinge, a cabinet-door handle and chicken wire, among other curious materials. It was used by Nashville recording artist David Bevins, who began his career in Ticonderoga with the Chilson Hill Gang and went on to become national dobro champion.

This in miniature is the sort of curiosity that Eric Sherman said he remembers as a kid, when his family would make the rounds of Frontier Town, Santa’s Workshop and the Land of Make Believe. These roadside attractions were seemingly around every bend in two-lane America, and that is the intent of 22 Pawn, where the unexpected is to be expected.

It is also a safe place, a spot where, along with your shoes, you leave politics, religion, schedules and modern technology at the door. “I think of it as a functional museum,” Eric Sherman said. “Most people are listening to music on their phones, but we’re trying to keep the old way alive.”

Sherman’s own phone chirps. He gives it a look of mild disgust.

“I think we have something here that will captivate people,” he said. “We have talented musicians who record and play here, but we also want families and children to come.”

And if they miss the next ferry, the Shermans will have done their job.