Discoveries.

Without preamble the caller said "a lady at the art museum said you will look at our jar."

I explained to Susan (as we'll call her here) that appraisers charge for time like plumbers, and I asked her to describe it.

"My husband's grandmother made sauerkraut in it on her back porch down in Round O, South Carolina; it's green--no, it's gray-green."

"How big is it," I asked.

"About this big," she replied, probably gesturing like a fisherman. "Bill" (we'll call him), she called, "please measure the jar."

And at this point her husband entered the conversation. "It's got writing on it," he said. "L. Miles and Dave and a date--February 10, 1840."

Their description catalogued the hallmarks of nineteenth-century Edgefield stoneware. Deposits of clay and kaolin--white, fine, porcelain-like clay--in the Edgefield District in southwestern South Carolina had been used by the Cherokee Indians and then by colonists before the Revolution. By the 1830s several commercial potteries were producing utilitarian churns, jugs, and storage jars.