GILLETTE – When Briana Brewer was a kid, she wanted nothing to do with antiques. She spent many car rides with her dad, Jeff Wandler, as he drove to what seemed to be the middle of nowhere to pick up what some would consider old junk.

“All of our family vacations were antique shopping. That’s all we did,” Brewer said. “I hated antiques. I said I would never look at them again, that I’d never go into an antique store.
“Then I got older and a little bit wiser.”
What was once her nightmare has become a passion. Today, Brewer sells antiques for a living at Frontier Relics, an antique store that shares a building with the Frontier Auto Museum, which houses her dad’s collection of cars, gas pumps and signs.
She recognizes that she doesn’t collect on the same level as her father.
“She doesn’t have the same disease I have,” Wandler said.
The two recently expanded their operation, moving into the space next door, previously occupied by Joe’s Pet Depot. Together, the father-daughter team rescues pieces of history and shares them with younger generations.
Wandler’s penchant for collecting started when he was a kid. Like many children, he collected things like model cars and comic books, but he would always keep his collection organized and displayed.
“If I built model cars, I would build shelves and put them up,” he said. “My mom said my bedroom looked like a museum.”
When Wandler was 30, he bought his first gas pump at an auction to go with his father’s car collection.
“I liked it a lot, so I started looking for more,” he said.
Twenty-one years later, he now has about a hundred gas pumps, with 40 on display in the museum. In fact, he estimated the museum houses about 70 percent of his collection.
“I don’t want to clutter the place up, but strategically I’ll move pieces in that fit the brands or the theme that’s in here,” he said.
Years ago, Wandler and his father, Leon, moved a 1915 gas station from Osage to Rozet because Leon’s collection was filling up the garage. They thought the gas station would be big enough.
“But we no more than got it put together when we had it full,” Wandler said.
They ended up filling two buildings with antiques.
Leon died in 2004, but Jeff kept adding to the collection. He wanted to share it with people instead of keeping it out in the country. So, in 2016, he opened Frontier Auto Museum at the corner of Second Street and Ross Avenue in a building that had been a Ford dealership in 1949.
Even then, he was already thinking about how he could expand. When the pet store next door closed last summer, it opened the doors for the museum to grow. Wandler bought the building, and the museum closed in late 2017 for remodeling.
It reopened in early February, in a new, 12,000-square-foot space shared with Brewer’s antique store, which includes a collection of old books and records people can play before they buy them.
“It was definitely exciting,” Brewer said. “It’s just exciting to see people’s reactions. It’s not even the same place anymore.”
Last year, Wandler and Brewer visited Okoboji Classic Cars, a museum in Iowa, which houses a replica of a town built inside. Wandler fell in love with the concept and wanted to bring that to Gillette.
In addition to the cars, gas pumps and neon signs that filled the museum last year, it now has features such as a department store, a garage and a general store. There’s a phone booth from a railroad depot in Loveland, Colo., and a barber shop from Chappell, Neb.
Although the museum and antique store might not strike people as a kid-friendly place, both Brewer and Wandler have been surprised by how much some kids enjoy it.
On field trips, some children just rush through the museum as quickly as possible, Wandler said. But others have a greater appreciation for the antiques.
“Certain kids, they want to know all about it, they love it, they love the old cars, they love the old gas pumps and they are into it, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about that,” he said.
Sometimes children like it so much that “the next week, they’re bringing their parents,” Brewer said.
Although his collection is dedicated to the past, Wandler said he doesn’t mind the present, either.
“I like my new Ford pickup. I wouldn’t drive a ’50 Ford pickup every day,” he said. “We just have an appreciation for how things used to be.”
The appeal of antiques, he said, is their ability to transport people back in time.
“A lot of older people, they used this stuff and grew up with it, so they’re very sentimental about it,” he said. “We like how things used to be made, the craftsmanship that went into it.”
Cars were handmade, and signs and gas pumps were brightly colored and decorated with elaborate logos. But at some point – Wandler said he thinks it was the 1970s – the world became utilitarian. Products became impersonal.
“I didn’t have to have a pretty logo to sell you gas anymore, I just had to have one word,” he said.
These days, “stuff just isn’t as unique anymore,” Brewer said. “It’s to use and get rid of.”
Wandler said he turned down an opportunity to buy some gas pumps from the 1990s.
“To me, they’re very basic looking. There’s no appeal to me. But somebody will like those gas pumps,” he said. “But I definitely think somebody would collect that, maybe they had a Camaro that fueled up at the BP or something.”
As much as he loves the past, back then he said, “I think we used to work a lot harder.”
“If you gave me a choice that I could go through a door and could be back in the ’50s, I don’t know if I’d do that or not,” he said.
Brewer, on the other hand, said that even with the conveniences of the 21st century, she would “definitely” walk through that door.
“It would be nice to have a world where there’s no cellphones,” she said. “Families were closer and spent more time together. Also, you could let your kids go off and not have to worry about them as much.”
While a lot of the items in the museum and antique store are gone forever, like the Hudsons or old-style gas pumps, sometimes things come back. Wandler thought back to his collection of 2,000 record albums.
“I couldn’t get rid of them 15 years ago,” he said. “I got tired of moving them around my garage, so I finally gave them away.”
According to billboard.com, 2017 was the 12th straight year of growth for vinyl album sales. Wandler said people come into Frontier Relics every week looking for records and not just Baby Boomers.
“The millennials are bringing it back because it’s a new experience for them,” Brewer said. “The sound you get off those old records is nothing you can recreate today through digital music.
Some people will come in just to listen to records for a couple of hours, she said.
“That crackling sound on the record player, it’s relaxing, it puts you back in time,” she said.
At the end of the day, antiques are just things. It’s the human stories behind them that allows people to connect to them, Wandler said, like how he and his father transported a gas station 50 miles or how the barber shop from Nebraska was owned by one barber for decades.
Brewer said she’s had people come into the store with a family heirloom, worried that when they die, their children would just throw it away.
“To take that stuff from that person and keep it going, it’s almost like keeping a piece of them going,” she said.
“I love that I’m rescuing some of that history and redisplaying it,” Wandler said.
By rescuing history, Brewer and Wandler are keeping people’s stories alive, passing them along to visitors for years to come.