Old Mason Jars: Which Ones Are Worth $2 and Which Are Worth $200

My name is Isaac Miller. I am Amish, and I have kept a forge in Lancaster County for thirty-some years. My father taught me to read a canning jar the same way he taught me to read a weld. You find Mason's Patent, November 30th, 1858 pressed into an old jar and figure it came from before the Civil War. Or you figure old glass is old glass and let the box go for a dollar. Either way, the glass was telling you something else. That date is a patent date, not a birthday. Glasshouses kept pressing it into jars for fifty years after, and by 1905 Ball alone made better than forty million a year. Collectors pay for color, closure, mistakes and scarcity, not age. The glass remembers what was in the sand. Aqua is iron. Amber is iron and sulfur run hot. Purple is manganese turned by years of sunlight. I call the fix the lip and the light. Run your thumb across the mouth. A rough, frosted lip was ground by hand before about 1900. A smooth one came off a machine. Then hold the jar to a window and read the color. The kit is a forty-five-dollar book, a three-dollar flashlight and a five-dollar magnifying glass. An appraiser charges thirty to fifty dollars an item. For forty jars, that is twelve hundred dollars at the low end. In this video I show you how to read a patent date, how to feel for a hand-ground lip, which colors to set aside, how to spot mistakes in the lettering, how to catch overseas reproductions, how to clear cellar haze, and why the Ball blue went away around 1937. I also tell you where it falls short. Most jars are two-dollar jars, and you may sort a hundred or two hundred before you find a good one. Vinegar will not cure etched glass. --- **WHAT YOU WILL NEED** The Red Book collector's reference, $45 Flashlight, $3 Magnifying glass, $5 White vinegar A plastic brush, never metal **A WORD OF CAUTION** Do not can food in these old jars. The lips carry chips too small to see, and one that lets go in a boiling-water bath is a genuine danger. Keep a wire brush off the zinc lids. It takes half their value. Subscribe for the next one, where a gate mark and a heat ring separate the ten-dollar skillet from the three-hundred-dollar pan. #masonjars #antiquejars #balljars #canningjars #antiques #estatesale #yardsale #amish