The Heritage Guild held its third annual "Afternoon of Antique Appraisals" on Sunday, October 29.  Appraiser Tom Keener was on hand to evaluate glass, china, books, furniture, dolls, and jewelry to tell owners if their items had cash value in addition to sentimental value.

This Tiffany basket is priceless. Tiffany used opalescent glass in a variety of colors and textures to create a unique style of stained glass. The method of painting in glass paint or enamels on colorless glass was dominant for several hundred years in Europe, but use of the colored glass itself made Tiffany famous. Although this basket had Tiffany's iridescence, it lacked a Tiffany signature, which sometimes wore off. This basket was valued at $25,000.

This painting, by Edward Gustav Eisenlohr, was a painter of subjects and scenes in Texas. He was born in 1872 in Ohio and moved with his family to Oak Cliff, Texas, in 1874. At the age of 14, he and his family moved to Europe where he studied in Karlsruhe, the capital of Grand Duchy of Baden (southwestern Germany) and Zurich, Switzerland. Eisenlohr studied under Frank Reaugh, known as the "Dean of Texas Artists" he helped start the Dallas Art Association (now the Dallas Museum of Art). Eisenlohr documented the early twentieth-century landscape of Dallas in over 1,000 drawings, watercolors, pastels, oil paintings, and lithographs. His earliest drawings and paintings recorded abandoned buildings on the edge of the city, as well as the emerging skyline of Dallas. He also painted fields, farms, and country churches around growing Dallas. Like other impressionists, he felt a responsibility to record the images of his surroundings. He produced more drawings and paintings of his local community and region than any other early Dallas artist and is considered one of the pioneer landscape painters of Texas. Eisenlohr is buried in the Oak Cliff Cemetery in Dallas.

This "statue" actually sat atop a clock and is estimated to be over 100 years old.  It's silver is very tarnished, but it is valued at $500 to $750.

An Allen resident brought a trunk containing her great-great-grandfather's Confederate hat and ammunition holder. Any artifacts from the Confederacy are extremely rare. While having great sentimental value to the woman, the hat and ammo holder are estimated to be valued at $2,000.

Tom Keener has the audience captivated as he looks at items, tells stories, estimates values, and tells owners how to care for their items. Behind Tom is just one of the many storyboards containing pictures of old Allen. This particular storyboard is "People of Allen", but there are others that depict transportation, homes, schools, etc