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The Flea Wedding and Other Wonders from Eva Way's Collections Eva Way may have been the ultimate collector. Not only could Mrs. Way, a farm woman, not bear to throw anything away, she couldn't bear to see anybody else throw anything away either. "Anybody who had anything they didn't want and didn't know what to do with, they took it to her," said her daughter, Catherine Wilkerson. So Eva Way collected. Coins, shells, pitchers, books, magazines, newspapers, paintings, clothes, furniture, gourds, military paraphernalia, jewelry, radios, coffee mills, kitchenware, opium pipes, baskets, eyeglasses, pottery, typewriters, farm tools, and even old, everyday, worn-out shoes, which she prized above all other things. You name it, most likely Eva Way had a few, if not dozens of them. It began with buttons when Mrs. Way was newly wed. She accumulated more than 30,000 different ones. She moved on to string from feed sacks, rolling it into huge balls. So compelling did her passion for collecting eventually become that she kept the freakish animals born on the farm, pickling them in jars and carefully labeling them ("hare-lipped puppy," "one-eyed pig"). Before it was over, she was even taking gallstones, cataracts, hideous ingrown toenails, and tumors that doctors cut from her neighbors (one monstrous pickled tumor fills a ten-gallon aquarium). Mrs. Way packed a twelve-room house and a huge barn with her collections, and for more than forty years she kept her home open to visitors who wanted to see it all. After her death at age ninety-three in 1962, her family was perplexed about what to do with everything. "I tried to sell it all because I was sick and tired of it," said Mrs. Wilkerson. "I sold for two years. After I got tired of selling, some ladies and I got together and decided to put it up as a museum." The town of Belhaven accepted part of Mrs. Way's collections, and in 1965 the Belhaven Memorial Museum was opened on the second floor of the town hall. The hit of the museum is Mrs. Way's dried flea wedding-all the fleas dressed and in church-which has to be viewed with a large magnifying glass. Nobody knows where Mrs. Way got it, but nobody was surprised that she had it.
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