Antiques Roadshow

GUEST: Well, I believe I brought you a placard or a poster on heavy card stock advertising, uh, Bandelier National Monument in the National Park System.

And it's a WPA poster.

My wife and I have visited, uh, northern New Mexico for years, 36 years.

Proposed to her there, uh, honeymoon there.

This piece happened to be in kind of a dirty corner of an antique mall.

It was covered with dust, New Mexico dust, just kind of struck a chord in my heart.

We paid $22 in 2024.

APPRAISER: What you have here is a silk-screened poster.

You say placard, I would say poster.

It is printed on card.

As an archaeological site, it was the home to the, the Ancestral Puebloan people.

Just an incredible monument to the early peoples of America.

It dates from 1941.

The national parks were created in 1916.

In 1934, the WPA-- the Works Progress Administration-- designed the first series of posters promoting the national parks by, by an artist named Dorothy Waugh.

And then, in 1938, they began a second series promoting the parks, which ran from 1938 until 1941, at which point the Second World War broke out, and basically most of the artisan artisans were taken from the WPA workshops and put to work for the war effort.

At the very bottom here, it says "WPA CCC"-- the Civilian Conservation Corps.

And they were responsible for building the infrastructure in the national parks.

These were done in Berkeley, California, in the WPA workshop there.

They made 100.

When they were made, they cost $12 for every hundred.

So that's 12 cents each, was the price of these posters.

Because this is printed on card, a lot of times these were taken, they were cut into quarters and used as file dividers in national park offices.

GUEST (chuckling): I've heard that.

APPRAISER: There are about six intact copies of this poster, all in public institutions.

This may be the last one privately held.

It's not one of the famous national parks.

And you know, they always say "location, location, location."

So, a Yosemite poster... APPRAISER: ...might fetch more money, but they're all so rare and they're all so collected.

My estimate on this, at auction, would be between $8,000 and $12,000.

GUEST: That's surprising.

That's surprising.

I thought maybe $1,000.

APPRAISER: Two of them were the Wind Cave and the Smoky Mountains.

There are no original copies that have yet to be found.