Vintage & Antique Baskets & Buckets

A 13th-century word, bucket derives from the Old English word “buc”, meaning a pitcher with a bulging vessel or belly. Buckets with handles are a medieval invention that to this day provides functionality to everything from storage to decor, composting, firefighting, animal feeding, kindling storage, water carriage, flower selling, and more.
Our curated collection of vintage buckets represents a variety of materials. From English leather buckets traditionally used in England and later America to put out fires in the hearth, to coopered wooden buckets held together with metal banding for storing feed for animals or putting up butter, cider and ale, gun powder, and grains for people, to galvanized lightweight buckets with handles that made it easy to transport and sell flowers at the village market, to Chinese wooden water well buckets from the turn of the 20th century, this collection of buckets represents functional art. The most valuable buckets today are those made by coopers over a century ago when water-tight vessels were made by hand by skilled craftsmen and were often an accepted and recognized measurement for volume.