Antiques Roadshow

HOST

And now for an entirely different kind of folk art. Twenty years ago, appraiser Wes Cowan had never heard of Andrew Clemens, a young man from McGregor, Iowa, who in the late 1800s, mastered the meticulous art of filling bottles with colored sand, grain by grain. But that all changed dramatically in 2002, when a guest named Tom Ellsworth brought his fragile heirloom to the Hot Springs Roadshow.

APPRAISER

I was at the folk art table and gentleman walked up and he showed me this bottle that was filled with sand. But it wasn't just a bottle filled with sand. It was an unbelievable construction. I took one look at it and I just my mind was completely blown.

GUEST

We're not really sure what to call it, but it's colored sand in a jar. And it was presented to my great grandfather around the end of the Civil War. He was a sergeant in the Union Army, I believe, from New York. And this was a gift from two of his friends. And it's been in my family ever since.

APPRAISER

Let's start with who your great grandfather was. He didn't come from New York. He came from Illinois. And he spent most of his civil war career in the Hot Springs, Arkansas, vicinity. The real interesting thing about this remarkable piece of sand art, though, is just what you see here. Not only is his name on it, but on the back you see this wonderful eagle with a thirty six star flag is spinning around and you see his name is written in script. There's a mortar and pestle. All of this is done with individual grains of sand. And when you flip it up, the label on the bottom says pictured rock and sand by A. Clemens, deaf mute from McGregor, Iowa. I had never heard of this guy. And and I was sitting at a table with two top folk art experts in the country, and they'd never heard of Andrew Clemens. So it was a real moment of discovery, I think, for all of us. He went to the deaf mute school in Iowa and would come home in the summers, and he started going to the spot on the Mississippi River in McGregor, Iowa, and collecting sand and sort of experimenting with making these bottles. He used a great big oversize fishhook and like a popsicle stick, and he would pack it in this bottle and manipulate it with the fish. By the time he was about 17, he was really into it. And from 17 on until he died, he was basically working with this colored sand that he was collecting locally. We know that for part of his career, he sat in the front window of a grocery store so people could watch him make bottles. He also apparently worked at the family home in front of a window there. He actually had a rate sheet that he had printed up, pictured rock sand from Andrew Clemens, McGregor, Iowa. If you want to order a bottle that's a half pint are a pint or a quarter pint. If you wanted a marine scenes, he advertises a locomotive, a sailboat, steamboat, all these were priced differently. The fact that he had this rate sheet printed shows that, you know, he was peddling these things far and wide or trying to. The Iowa State Museum has Clemens's masterpiece bottle, which he made for his mother that has George Washington on horseback, has a steamboat, has the state seal of Iowa all on the same bottle. It's absolutely mind blowing. It is a remarkable piece of folk art on today's market. I would guess that it's between four and six thousand dollars of what it might bring more than that in the right auction. Great piece is great. The market for Clemens sand bottles. It has been it's been pretty astonishing. The market perked along for a number of years where bottleswere selling for five ten thousand dollars. 2015 - 2016. Couple of bottles, right. Thirty five or forty thousand dollars. I didn't sell those first for that amount of money. And I was I remember being, whoa, that's pretty astonishing that much money for one of these bottles. The next time we had a bottle, I think I had it estimated. I can't even remember thirty to forty thousand. But I do remember there were phone bidders and I remember it blowing past. Fifty thousand dollars. Sixty thousand dollars? Seventy thousand dollars. It was like there was like, really? Are you serious? Somebody is paying. This is this is like with the buyer's premium, like a hundred thousand dollars. This is serious money. Then six months later, I had two more. Both of them sold for more than one hundred thousand dollars in the same auction. The owner of the bottle that the gentleman that I interviewed first in Hot Springs in almost 20 years ago contacted Collins last spring, and he said, we've made the decision to sell the bottle. And would you like to handle a bottle? Like, duh. Of course, we were prepared to drive down to Arkansas. Pick the bottle up and kept waiting to hear from the gentleman when we could do it, when we could do it. And the next thing I know is that, well, you know, we've made other arrangements. I suspected. Knowing who had sold other bottles, that it had to be, you know, one of maybe three or four other places that sold a bottle. And lo and behold, the Skinner.

HOST

By a strange coincidence, it turned out that Mr. Elsworth son was an old college friend of another roadshow appraiser LaGina Austin. And when he reached out to LaGina at Skinner auctions in 2020 for help selling his Clemens bottle, LaGina was excited to oblige.

APPRAISER

I received a message from someone I had gone to college with that his father had something he was interested in and selling. And after a week of back and forth, he finally said yes, he wanted to sell it. We came up with 50 to 75 thousand dollars during pandemic.We're doing either timed online auctions or we're doing virtual online auctions. The auction that the sandbar was going in was going to be a timed online auction and it was going to run from November 13th through November 23rd. So it was open for bidding on November 13th. And almost immediately, as with all online auctions, there was a flurry of bidding. It had a bit of 40,000 dollars. And it sat there for about a week. A lot of times the action doesn't take place. So the last day, sometimes within the last hour. So the last day I'm working from home. I kept refreshing it all day. And it's set at 50,000 dollars. Finally got up to 75,000 dollars. So I was like, OK, it made the high estimate, sit down to eat dinner. And then I got a text from Mr. Elsworth who said, wow, it's really taken off now. And so then I dragged the computer back out at the dinner table and my family and I all watched it as this happened in the last probably 15 or 20 minutes of the auction that it hammered at two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. And then with the buyer's premium, two hundred and seventy five thousand dollars. Then I got a text from Mr. Elsworth and his son, both. Wow. You know, everyone was just amazed. I thought it could certainly reach 100000 dollars or more. I didn't know that it would break the 200 thousand dollar mark. I did some quick research and figured out that it was, in fact, a new record. And so it's it's an amazing thing. These Sandahl bottles, they're rare. They can't be reproduced. Or if they can, that would be like to see the person who could reproduce that if it gets damaged, then you're left with nothing. So the interest is what would drive the interest in any extraordinary object. I have no idea how many bottles are left out there, but I do know once an auction price such as this is achieved, two hundred and seventy five thousand dollars that they'll start coming out of.