GUEST: This was awarded to my great-grandfather in 1908 for a sales and marketing event that happened with Union Oil. And that's pretty much all I know about it.
APPRAISER: It was presented in 1908, which, in San Francisco, there was the earthquake and the terrible fire of 1906.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: So this is not very long after the devastation that happened in San Francisco. And this is a piece made by a San Francisco silversmith, Shreve and Company, of San Francisco. Okay. Which is a firm that had East Coast connections and then moved to California. Benjamin Shreve stayed on the East Coast, and he later became involved in the Shreve, Crump, & Low company that's in Boston, that's, that's also a famous company. But this piece just shrieks Shreve and Company, San Francisco. They made all kinds of silver. They made plainer neoclassical silver, but this was sort of their stock-in-trade, this type of medieval-style Gothic Revival. Beautiful hand-hammering, and this is classic Gothic-Revival strap work that you see here. And these really sort of sexy loop handles that, that make it sort of masculine and feminine at the same time. It's just a gorgeous, eye-catching piece. In terms of auction value, I think that it would be about $4,000 to $6,000, so...
GUEST: My, my! (laughs) Thank you. That's awesome.
APPRAISER: Well, thank you.
GUEST: I'm very excited.
