Never Pass These 5 Cast Iron Pans at a Flea Market (They're Worth a Fortune)

THE BARN FIND BIBLE: the maker marks, the stamps, the dating rules and the real sold prices, all in one place: https://barnfindbible.com A skillet sat on a card table at a flea market outside Onawa, Iowa with $10 of masking tape on it. Black as a stove lid, rust down one side, not one letter cast into it anywhere. Three people ahead of me picked it up, turned it toward the light hunting for a name, found nothing, and set it back on the stack. I never looked for a name at all. I thumbed the inside, it was slick as a window pane, and the bottom was flat and bare. That pan brought $220. Same rust, same $10 tape. Somebody just bothered to turn it over. This one is not about what is out in your barn. It is about what is on a stranger's table this Saturday morning with the seller standing right there watching your hands, and the five second read that tells you whether to keep hold of it or set it down. Counting down the five cast iron pans I never walk past, and how to read each one in the aisle at six in the morning with a flashlight: 5. THE UNMARKED SMOOTH BOTTOM PAN. The most common good pan on any field and the one everybody walks past, because a person hunting cast iron is hunting a word. Heat ring or no heat ring, where the size number sits, machined interior versus a pebbly modern casting, and the thin light wall of the old iron against a thick rough import. Most are $20 to $60 cooking pans, which is exactly why nobody looks. 4. THE GATE MARKED PAN. The raised scar across the bottom where the foundry broke off the pour tab, pre 1890s iron. You find it with your thumb, not your eyes, in one second, and they turn up in the junk box under the table more than anywhere else because they usually carry no maker name at all. 3. THE PAN WITH NOTCHES IN THE HEAT RING. Old Lodge. Nobody else notched a heat ring, and Lodge did not cast their own name into their pans until the late 1970s, so the older ones read as nameless nobodies to the seller. 2. THE ODD SIZE. The sizes that were barely made because nobody cooked with them. The size is the money more often than the maker is, and sellers price by how big and heavy a pan looks, which is backwards from how collectors pay. 1. THE ONE WITH ITS LID STILL ON IT. A lid is half the money on a covered piece, and it is the half that gets separated at every estate sale in the country, because pans stack and lids do not. A complete piece on a table has survived something most of them did not, and it is almost never priced like it. Also the free question almost nobody asks a seller. THE TABLE ROUTINE, handed over in one piece between 3 and 2: turn it over before you read the price, spin it upside down for warp, thumb the cooking surface, sight the rim and the handle joint for a crack, and ring it, because a good pan rings and a cracked one thuds. Then the manners, ask before you move somebody's stack, and the buying rule, offer on the whole pile and never on the one pan you want. Two honest notes. Most cast iron on a flea market table is a $20 to $60 cooking pan and I say so all the way through, which is the only reason the big numbers are believable. The four figure piece in this video is labelled as the exception, because it is one. I am a picker, not a specialist, and I never put a price on somebody's pan sight unseen. Look at COMPLETED and SOLD listings for the exact mark you find, never asking prices. Tell me below the best pan you ever pulled off a table, and where you're watching from. I read every single one.