Four generations of finding
Miracle Supply Co. has been operating from a small storefront on Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island since 1923. What began as a curiosity shop is now a sourcing service — for museums, restorers, engineers, filmmakers, and private clients who have already tried everywhere else.
The Miller family
Ellis opened a curiosity shop on Weybosset Street with a bank draft, a rented ground floor, and one horse. He specialized at first in Victorian ephemera and taxidermy for the natural history departments at Brown and Providence College. The shop became known — in a small way, as such things go — for finding the specific object no one else could.
Dorothy took over in 1948 after her father's stroke and moved the house to its current address on Benefit Street. She expanded into scientific instruments and antique optics, quietly built a reputation for authentication, and began the archive we still consult — an index of every object that ever passed through the shop.
Marcus added the industrial-parts business almost by accident. In 1983 a paper mill in Central Falls needed a specific gearbox for a Swiss machine no one made parts for anymore. He found it, and then found another, and then another. The obsolete-parts inventory now runs from vacuum tubes to Allen-Bradley PLC modules.
Simone trained as a conservator at Winterthur before joining her father in the shop. She has extended our reach into continental Europe and Japan, digitized the family archive without changing the storefront a single bit, and is teaching her son to test tubes on a Hickok 539C at seven years old.
How we work
We won't sell what we can't authenticate. Every claim about era, maker, or provenance is checked against the archive and confirmed with an outside specialist when needed.
For tubes: full electrical testing on period-appropriate equipment. For instruments: reference to plate marks, serial ledgers, and, for the harder cases, the maker's descendants.
Some clients cannot be named. Some sellers won't be. We are comfortable operating quietly, and have been doing so for a century.
We do not restore — that is a trade of its own. We refer to specialists in Boston, London, Vienna, and Kyoto whose work we know first-hand.
47 Benefit Street, Providence
A three-story brick townhouse from 1811, converted for retail in 1949. The front room is open by appointment Tuesday through Saturday, ten to six. Reach out through the sourcing form or the telephone number in the footer if you would like to visit.