GUEST: My husband bought it in 1998. I had worked with the fire marshal in Columbia, South Carolina, and he had been contacted by an antiques dealer from Boston. The fire marshal received a circular about this pitcher and requests that he consider buying it. The fire marshal called me to see if I had any ideas about how he could raise money to purchase the pitcher for his museum. But when I looked at it, with the presentation to G. Monteith, I knew that that was someone in my husband's family. And that is Galloway Monteith, who was my husband's great-great-grandfather. He was head of the volunteer company of Black firefighters in the 1840s in Columbia. The inscription says, "For his steadfastness during a fire," with the date of, uh, September 22, 1846.
APPRAISER: So I did a little bit of researching and went back to the old-fashioned way, and I picked up the telephone and I called about eight or nine different historical societies and archives and museums and libraries in the Columbia and Charleston and general South Carolina area. Three of them had little bits of information that adds to the story.
GUEST: Amazing!
APPRAISER: So... Of the various volunteer fire departments at that time, all of them but one allowed for members to be Black, either-- and of course, slavery was still going on...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: ...so they were either freed Black men or slaves who were able to become members of the volunteer fire company. There is a building engraved on it,
which is on fire.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: And we can surmise that that building is actually a hotel owned by a man named William Maybin that was burned and set on fire by an arsonist on that date.
GUEST: Really?
APPRAISER: The hotel did not actually burn, but all of the buildings behind it did. So it's most likely that this was presented in great appreciation by the insurance company, on, who, whose name, Aetna, is on the front of the pitcher in appreciation for having saved the hotel, so they didn't have to pay an insurance claim on it.
GUEST: Yes, that sounds like a great story.
APPRAISER: (laughing) It is, uh, Southern coin silver. So, do you know the maker of the, of the piece?
GUEST: Uh, I think it says on the bottom "Gail and Hayden."
APPRAISER: It actually says "Gregg and Hayden," but, but...
GUEST: Oh, Gregg.
APPRAISER: But Gregg and Hayden was a South Carolina silversmith, actually, in, in Charleston, South Carolina. It's a really wonderful engraving. The building, which is on fire with the smoke coming out of it, and then below it, here on the right, we have the fire engine, which is a horse-drawn fire engine. At that time period, the supervisors of the fire departments were all white.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: But many of the people who worked on the fire department were actually African American. They were highly sought-after to be drivers of these horse-drawn fire engines because of their previous experience.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: A lot of them had been driving these heavy horse-drawn vehicles at very high speeds, which was required, and a lot of their white counterparts did not have that skill. Columbia at the time was a town of, uh, roughly 4,000 people, give or take, in the 1840s, mid-1840s. And it was a rather bawdy town.
GUEST: (laughs)
APPRAISER: A lot of... A lot of crime reports for back then. One reason that I had a, such difficulty, uh, finding anything as far as records go is that so many records from that time period were destroyed by fire, because fire was so prevalent, and those records just don't exist. If this were made in England or if it was made in New England, those are more common, and so the values are modest. A pitcher like this would probably be worth in the neighborhood of $400 to $600. Being Southern, and being by a major Southern silversmith, the value goes up exponentially. If it didn't have all of this engraving and all of this history on it, you would be talking $1,500 to $2,000. However, because it is historical in interest and importance, related to Black firefighters and a historical fire that happened in Columbia, I would think that the value of it would be somewhere between $5,000 and $8,000 if it came up for auction.
GUEST: (gasps) Oh, that's wonderful news.
APPRAISER: (chuckling): Great, well...
GUEST: Oh, I'm so pleased to hear that.
APPRAISER: And you said your husband bought it.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: Do you know what he paid for it? Do you know what, when he bought it...
GUEST: He paid $2,500 for it.
APPRAISER: Okay, well, that's a pretty good appreciation, I would think.
GUEST: Yes, it is.
