For the next few weeks, Manhattan’s antique scene will be overrun with artifacts once owned by America’s earliest moguls. The auctions and antique shows that cluster around what has come to be called “Americana Week” celebrate 18th- and 19th-century proto-Trumps: Those plucky pilgrims and displaced patricians who built dynasties wresting land from Native Americans or sending trading ships to the West Indies. Christie’s and Sotheby’s are both fielding massive auctions, and a number of antiques shows will set-up shop concurrently around town.

The fanciest retail offerings will be displayed in velvet-lined booths at the annual Winter Antiques Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, which opens January 21 and runs until January 30. This dazzling display of Chippendale chests, schoolgirl needlepoint, Colonial silver tankards, and Audubon bird prints will include classic examples of “good, better, best” – to use the terms coined by the dean of furniture dealers, Albert Sack, in his famous 1950s rating system for American furniture.

Top collectors like Fidelity Chairman Ned Johnson, however, are firmly focused on the best. “There is a group of well-heeled collectors today who want masterworks,” said Woodbury, Conn., dealer David Schorsch, who will be exhibiting at the Winter Antiques Show and bidding at the auctions. While the very top lots might command masterpiece prices, watch out for deals in the middle and lower end of the market.

At the auctions, the race begins today, as American furniture scholars from around the country converge at Sotheby’s in honor of … a tea table. The auctioneer is hosting a day-long symposium on 18th-century Rhode Island furniture as part of the pre-sale hoopla surrounding the sale of a famous Chippendale tea table hitting the auction block January 22.

The piece is part of a single-owner sale of property owned by the Goddard family – one of four sales Sotheby’s has organized from January 20 to 23, with a projected $14.7-25.6 million tally. The Goddard sale includes property that sat for decades in one of the most important historic homes in Providence, the Thomas Poynton Ives House. According to Sotheby’s, the five siblings who inherited the furniture are selling it in order to fairly split the inheritance.

Photographs in the catalog show a three-story brick mansion that rivals the splendor of a museum and is filled with heirlooms acquired hundreds of years ago. Architectural historian William MacKenzie Woodward of the Rhode Island Preservation and Heritage Commission said the Ives House is one of a cluster of four historic properties (two are private and two semipublic including the John Brown House) which are among the most significant examples of homes constructed with money from the trade with China. “You just won’t find as important a group of houses anywhere in the country of that era and quality and proximity.”

Properties in the sale range in price from an estimated $50 (a pair of 20thcentury Chinese vases) up to $5 million, so there is something for buyers with wallets both thick and thin. The top lot is expected to be the mahogany tea table, once owned by one of the richest men of mid-18th-century New England, Nicholas Brown of Rhode Island.

The Goddards are descendants by marriage of the Brown family (namesakes of Brown University) and, according to Leslie Keno, Sotheby’s American furniture specialist, perhaps distant relations of famed Newport cabinetmaker John Goddard, who made the table for Nicholas Brown following the businessman’s 1762 wedding.(Mr. Woodward disagrees, and notes the name Goddard was very common in 18th-century Rhode Island).The Browns’ vast empire included such diverse interests as the manufacture of iron and candles comprised of sperm oil as well as banking, insurance, cotton, and the highly profitable trade in rum and African slaves.

Furniture owned by Nicholas Brown has been charmed at auction: In 1989, Christie’s sold a Goddard desk and bookcase for $12.1 million – the highest price ever paid for a piece of American furniture. The most recent Goddard tea table to come up for sale was sold by Leigh Keno (Leslie’s brother and a dealer) at the Winter Antiques Show in 1998. A New York collector paid $3.65 million.

“This is a good example of where these pieces transcend the whole idea of furniture being just a craft,” said Mr. Keno. “It raises these pieces to a higher level of art.”

Sotheby’s has landed two other collections, including a group of colonial silver cups from the First Church of Christ in Farmington, Conn. The church says it intends to use the hundreds of thousands netted from the sale to build new space for events and a food pantry and to fund a school in the Sierra Leone. Finally, a husband and wife folk-art collecting team has retired to Florida but left the fruits of their 25-year buying spree behind at Sotheby’s.

“We are still on the chase, but now we are running after two energetic grandsons instead of enticing pieces of folk art,” said Jon and Becky Zoler in an appropriately folksy essay at the front of the auction catalog. The Zolers bought a little bit of everything, ranging across the folk-art categories with abandon: from wooden Schimmel sculpture to Pennsylvania Fractur watercolors to zinc Indian weathervanes by 19th-century Massachusetts craftsman A.L. Jewell.

Christie’s has the smaller sale this time around – though the hefty catalog, with 714 lots, is hardly slim pickings. The presale estimate is $9.3-14.3 million, and several pieces of furniture have dealers and collectors salivating. The best of the best is a circa-1760 marble-topped Chippendale table with undulating curves and legs encrusted with the sort of grotty, reddish-black patina coveted by American furniture junkies who lust for wood with an original surface. Sanding and staining – as anyone who watches “Antiques Roadshow” knows – are serious no-no’s in the furniture biz.

The table, now estimated at $800,000-$1.2 million, sold at Sotheby’s for $300,000 in 1983. It was purchased by dealer Israel Sack Inc. and sold to the private collector who has now con signed it to Christie’s. The big price is based on the rarity of marble-top tables from the Colonial era, especially those made in New York City. (Great early-American furniture usually comes from Boston, Philadelphia, or Newport, not New York.)

According to Christie’s, this table was commissioned by Colonel Aaron Cortelyou, who lived on Staten Island in the 1750s. This table was “very expensive and very extravagant” said Christie’s American furniture expert, Andrew Brunk, who pointed out the 4-inch girth on the front of the table, indicating the meaty slice of mahogany needed to make the table.

History also comes alive in 25 lots from the estate of Robert D.L. Gardiner, famed eccentric and self-dubbed “16th Lord of the Manor” of Gardiner’s Island. The Late “Lord,” who died in 2004, held claim to a 3,350-acre island located at the Eastern End of Long Island. He led famous death-defying tours of his island, which began with high-speed boat trips skippered by Mr. Gardiner himself. He would then pile his guests into Jeeps without tops and proceed to point out notable sites (Captain Kidd’s buried treasure, that sort of thing) while standing in the Jeep and yelling through a bullhorn.

The island came into the family in 1639, according to Christie’s, when Lion Gardiner bought the land from the Algonquin Indians in exchange for a gun, gunpowder, cloth, and a large black dog. Most people would be delighted to have the crafty old Lion in the family lineage. Legend has it he even rescued the daughter of an Indian chief and was rewarded with a gift of 100,000 more acres. Sadly for Lion’s offspring, he sold off these vast tracts in the 17th century.

Gardiner’s house on Main Street in East Hampton is listed for sale with Brown Harris Stevens for $9.9 million. The Chippendale chest from Gar diner’s bedroom is among the personal items up for sale at Christie’s: This 1772 Newport mahogany chest-on-chest is unique, as inside one drawer it remarkably retains the original paper label with the name of the maker, Thomas Townsend. Gardiner’s Island is now the great remaining legacy, and it has passed into the sole ownership of Robert Gardiner’s niece, Alexandra Creel Goelet. She’s married to the scion of another New York moneyed family and has promised to preserve the island.

Somewhat ironically, though, the possessions of Robert Gardiner, a man obsessed with family history, are being scattered to the auction winds. While he spent his days leading tours of his island and reminding people of the good old days of the Gardiner clan, he neglected to decide what to do to preserve his own legacy. He was married but didn’t have children and late in life he searched unsuccessfully for a rich person with the last name Gardiner to adopt.

“Important Americana” January 5 at 10:15 a.m., 12 p.m. & 2 p.m. Exhibition: January 15-21. “The Folk Art Collection of Jon and Rebecca Zoler” January 22 at 10:15 a.m. Exhibition: January 15-21. “Property of the Goddard Family” January 22 at 2 p.m. Exhibition: January 15-21. All at Sotheby’s (1334 York Avenue, at 71st Street, 212-606-7000).

“Important American Furniture, Folk Art, Silver & Prints, Including Mochaware from the Collection of Charles & Gloria Mandelstam” at Christie’s January 20 at 2 p.m. and January 21 at 10 a.m. & 2 p.m. Exhibition: January 14-19 (20 Rockefeller Plaza, 212-492-5485).

The Winter Antiques Show January 21-30 (Seventh Regiment Armory, 643 Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th Streets, 718-292-7392).