10 Old Cookie Jars That Are Secretly Worth A Fortune (You Might Own One)

Everybody thinks the old cookie jar on top of the refrigerator is junk. The chipped pig, the fat chef, the plain brown barrel grandma kept stale cookies in. Your brother-in-law swears it's a dollar at the yard sale, and he's wrong about more of them than he'll ever admit. This video flips those jars over and reads what the maker actually molded into the bottom, so you know what you have before anyone talks you into throwing it out. Marge priced thrift-shop donations for thirty-four years, and she walks through ten jars worth a second look: Shawnee's Smiley and Winnie pigs out of Zanesville, Ohio; Brush Pottery's Formal Pig with mold number W7; Abingdon's Little Miss Muffet (622) from Abingdon, Illinois; Red Wing's Pierre the chef from Minnesota and the problem of a married lid; Hull and Regal China's Little Red Riding Hood (967) from Crooksville, Ohio; the Autumn Leaf jar Hall China made for Jewel Tea, marked with Mary Dunbar's approval; American Bisque's cookie-time clock from Williamstown, West Virginia, identified by its unglazed wedge feet; Roseville's Water Lily (shape 1-8) and the drilled-lamp hole that ruins it; Metlox Poppytrail's mushroom from Manhattan Beach, California and the bleach mistake that destroys crazed glaze; and finally the McCoy brown "cookies" barrel from Roseville, Ohio, the most common of them all, along with the 1990s reproductions that faked the McCoy name on jars the company never made. Along the way she explains cold paint and why repainting kills value, how to tap for hairline cracks, and why the jars nobody loved are the ones that survived perfect. The jar that got ignored is the one that came through her back room worth the most, because neglect is what protected it. Sources and further reading: Mark Supnick and Ellen Supnick, Collecting Hull Pottery's Little Red Riding Hood Harold Nichols, McCoy Cottonwood Pottery Juanita and Wanda Colbert, Shawnee Pottery: The Full Encyclopedia Elaine Westover and Roberta Peterson, Collector's Encyclopedia of Red Wing Art Pottery Sharon and Bob Huxford, Collector's Encyclopedia of Roseville Pottery