GUEST: I got it at an estate sale about four or five years ago, and I happened to see this and just had to have it.
APPRAISER: Have you tried to do any research on it or...?
GUEST: I've tried to, but all I could find was like a smaller jug, and all they said was that it was a Southern jug.
APPRAISER: A Southern jug, yeah.
GUEST: Yeah. And it didn't really compare to this one. It was so much smaller, and it didn't have the small neck on it either, so...
APPRAISER: Okay. Well, it is indeed Southern. So the book that you were looking in was correct. And it is a type of jug that was made throughout the South. It has this wonderful what we call alkaline glaze, this sort of greenish glaze to it. And people who collect pottery get really excited about the fact that you can sort of see the drips in the glaze. The more drips you can see, the better it is.
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: And this one is a very, very handsome example of that. I like it. And you can see, too, that it has only a little bit of decoration here, an incised line decoration that was done while the piece was on the wheel, before it was fired. It's a classic ovoid form that you see from really mid-19th century throughout the rest of the 19th century, and into the 20th century. Do you mind telling us what you paid for this?
GUEST: I paid $50.
APPRAISER: $50?
GUEST: $50.
APPRAISER: Well, you made a very good buy. If I were to sell this, I would ask somewhere between $1,800 and $2,200 for it.
GUEST: Oh, my God!
APPRAISER: It's a wonderful piece of Southern pottery.
