Antiques Roadshow

GUEST

So my family is from Radford, Virginia, up in the mountains. And about 30 years ago, when my mother was selling the family house, all these papers were just haphazardly thrown in the attic, and she didn't know what they were, so she boxed them up and moved them to her house, and there they sat for another 30 years. And till about five years ago, I wondered what was in all those boxes, and I started opening them and found these letters.

APPRAISER

And they're all from your great-grandfather or...

GUEST

Great-great-grandfather, he was General Gabriel Wharton from the Confederacy.

APPRAISER

Right.

GUEST

And yeah, these are all his personal letters before, during, and after the war.

APPRAISER

That's what I find fascinating about it, because obviously, General Wharton was a very important Confederate general, and you have a tremendous amount of material from the war. But also material prior to and after that really fleshes out his life. So starting over here, we have a fabulous letter written to General Wharton, obviously before the war, by a Mr. Mason. Tell me a little bit about the letter from what you remember.

GUEST

So at this point, General Wharton was a surveyor for the railroad on the Gadsden Purchase. And he had friends who were throughout the west at that point, so this friend, Mr. Mason, was in Salt Lake City, and he was working for the Indian Affairs office, and he just writes him a letter to tell him what's going on...

APPRAISER

With the Mormons in Salt Lake City. With the Mormons in the city, yeah. Yeah, so it's a fascinating letter from 1859, and he recounts attending the Tabernacle Sunday events with Brigham Young, and it's a little bit derisive about the beautiful girls who make up his 64 wives.

GUEST

Yes.

APPRAISER

Now, when he was in the Civil War, he was involved in a number of very important campaigns, including the Battle for Fort Donelson. And we picked out from your archive just a letter, one letter here from General Lee, Robert E. Lee, dated April 21, 1862. And of course it was just after the Battle of Fort Donelson when Floyd and his troops had lost the battle to General Grant, and there was calls for unconditional surrender. So this very interesting war period letter from Lee, instructions to gather the troops and bring them together. Because it's an archive that expands beyond the war, and he was one of the last Confederate generals to be in operation before the final surrender...

GUEST

Yeah.

APPRAISER

You also have him returning after the war to do what?

GUEST

Well, you know, the Confederacy lost, and so he needed to have a job, and he went back to his old profession of surveying. And worked for the land office, and was very lucky to get the job, actually.

APPRAISER

Right.

GUEST

So in the 1880s, he's working for the land office out in New Mexico and Arizona.

APPRAISER

Right.

GUEST

And he has a narrow escape from Geronimo.

APPRAISER

This is a letter written to his wife, I believe, from April 1886.

GUEST

Right. Yes, yep.

APPRAISER

And of course, Geronimo would finally surrender to American troops in... later that year, in November of 1886.

GUEST

Right.

APPRAISER

He later acquired this cabinet card. It's a very famous cabinet card from C.S. Fly, who was based in Tombstone, Arizona.

GUEST

Okay.

APPRAISER

So it's an incredibly interesting archive. Have you ever had the archive evaluated or appraised or looked at?

GUEST

No.

APPRAISER

Well, I mean, it's very, very rich, and we only could pull out a few things. If it were to come to auction at a major auction house, it would probably have an aggregate value of $30,000 to $50,000.

GUEST

Oh, my goodness.

APPRAISER

And that might be conservative, given the richness of what you have.

GUEST

Thank you.

APPRAISER

Thank you, I'm so glad you were able to bring it in. Incredible.

GUEST

Thank you! Wow. Who knew what was in the attic? (chuckling)

APPRAISER

Yeah. You know?