Don't SELL These 11 Vintage Cookware Sets You Bought Before 1988— They're Worth A Fortune

Forty years of picking barns and estate auctions across the Midwest taught me that the ugliest pan in the pile is usually the one worth keeping. In this video I count down ten old cast iron skillets sitting in barns, cellars, and smokehouses right now that sell for hundreds, and in one case thousands of dollars, and I show you exactly how to tell them apart. We go through unmarked smooth-bottom pans, early Lodge, Birmingham Stove and Range, Wagner Ware Sidney, Favorite Piqua Ware, Wapak, both generations of the Griswold block logo, gate-marked nineteenth century iron, and the famous early Erie spider skillet that has crossed the block in the five figures. For every one of them I show you where to look and what you are looking at: the gate mark scar on the bottom, the heat ring, the size and pattern numbers, the logo generation, and the small differences that separate a thirty dollar cooking pan from a serious collector piece. I will also give you the honest odds, because most old cast iron is just a good pan that somebody's grandmother used well. And I will tell you the two mistakes that destroy value before a pan ever reaches a buyer, including the one thing you should never do to a rare skillet. Before you clean out that barn or haul a box of iron to the scrap yard, flip every pan over and read the bottom. The markings tell you everything. Drop a comment telling me what you found and where you're watching from. I read and answer every single one.