Mike is moving to Nashville

Mike Wolfe, co-star of American Pickers, recently moved to Nashville and opened an Antique Archaeology store. / Kristin Barlowe

Of all the locations for the choosing, reality star Mike Wolfe picked close to his heart when he made Nashville the location of his second Antique Archaeology store.

The co-star of History Channel’s American Pickers series is quick to say that whether he’s picking antiques or locations, he only picks what he loves. If that’s the case, this picker is having a love affair with all of Middle Tennessee.

As creator and co-star of the popular show, Wolfe offers a fascinating look at what pickers — the folks who scour the countryside for antiques — will go through to find vintage gold. While Wolfe logs some serious drive time all over the country scouting for treasures, he says his recent move to Nashville has, in many ways, brought him full circle.

“Nashville, to be honest with you, is key to why I even got this show,” Wolfe said. “In my small town, in my community, when I told people my idea for the show, they would laugh. Or they didn't understand.”

The draw of Lower Broadway

Though Wolfe is quick to say he will still maintain a presence in the tiny town of LeClaire, Iowa, where the initial season’s episodes were filmed, Nashville had him at hello.

“I was riding my motorcycle on the Natchez Trace and I cut through Nashville. Like everybody else, I ended up on Lower Broad, and I was like, ‘Man, this is so cool,’ ” Wolfe said.

Wolfe, an avid motorcyclist, then rode his bike to Leiper’s Fork and “ended up at Marty Hunt’s store, Leiper’s Fork Antiques, and I was blown away by the way the shop was put together.”

Wolfe credits Hunt, a woman he describes as “one of the modern-day founders of Leiper’s Fork,” as being one of the many Middle Tennesseans who championed him and his dream of a television show.

“I was naive. I had this idea for a show. I was like, you just call up the History Channel and tell them the idea,” he said. And that wasn’t the case. “I had to write a treatment, start pushing the idea to production companies, then edit the whole thing.”

Wolfe bought a video camera and starting filming the road trips that he and American Pickers co-star Frank Fritz took, logging hundreds of hours of video.

Hunt, who worked in the antique business for more than 20 years, remembers seeing the early video and being impressed with Wolfe’s commentary. What could have been simply an account of two men looking for junk was elevated by Wolfe’s personality.

“Mike can talk to a doorknob. He treats every person he meets with such enthusiasm and courtesy. And he is so passionate about antiques, restoration, people. It comes across,” Hunt said.

So Wolfe kept coming back to Nashville: He sold at the Nashville Flea Market and picked items for local antique dealers — “this community just gets my style, my stuff” — and he previewed his video to local antique dealers, art directors and music-industry folks and kept fine-tuning his ideas.

Highest ratings for History Channel

Wolfe spent almost four years honing the pitch. The show first aired in 2010 to the highest ratings the History Channel had ever scored.

American Pickers and his first American Archaeology store became so successful that Wolfe decided to put an addition on the shop.

“We started getting bids back on the shop in Iowa and it was around $200,000. For a town of 3,000, it didn’t make sense,” Wolfe explained. “We needed a bigger market.”

Wolfe said that since the “whole essence of the show was planted here in Nashville,” he looked here immediately for space.

His Nashville store, at 1300 Clinton St. in Marathon Village, is part showroom, part playground, with 2,000 square feet of space. It’s much bigger than his first shop, and Wolfe said people will be able to walk in and buy things they saw him pick on the show.

“This is my chance to take all the stuff we find and put it in here so people can say, ‘I get it.’ In Iowa, I don’t have the space or the market. People are not going to get it,” Wolfe said.

And Wolfe isn’t limiting his Nashville love affair to strictly selling vintage goods. The upcoming season of American Pickers will feature the saga of the start-up of the new store and his struggle to gather enough to keep both stores full.

In addition to nurturing the show, Wolfe also has an upcomingchildren’s book series, The Kid Picker, which will encourage children to learn the art of picking, and he’s trying his hand at songwriting, collaborating on an album called Music To Pick By. He credits Nashville with sparking what appears to be unlimited creativity.

“Nashville is this melting pot of creativity. If you can dream it, you can make it,” he said.