COREY HARRISON: Hey, how you doing?
LAUREN: Good, how are you?
I have some Civil War Navy buttons that I wanna sell.
COREY HARRISON: Cool.
Did you tear apart a jacket or something?
[laughs]
[folk music]
LAUREN: It's a good possibility somebody in the Civil War,
they were actually fighting in a battle
and had those buttons on their uniform.
I never had any piece of American history
before, so it was kind of neat coming across that.
It's not something you find every day.
I'm hoping to get $1,300 for them.
I really don't have any use for them,
and I could definitely use the money more than the buttons.
COREY HARRISON: So you got any of the backstory on them?
I found them in a house that I purchased,
and I found out that the previous owner's
grandfather was enlisted in the Navy during the Civil War.
OK.
He was Union, right?
LAUREN: Yes, he was.
COREY HARRISON: The Navy was kind of like the unsung
heroes of the Civil War.
The North just brought the ships down, blockaded all the ports.
It crippled the South.
I mean, they couldn't buy anything.
I mean, they couldn't get bullets for their guns.
Everything was rationed.
LAUREN: I had no idea.
During the Civil War, the South
had to get a lot of their supplies from Europe
because they didn't have anywhere near the manufacturing
that the North had.
So a major part of the North's strategy
was to block Southern ports so they
couldn't get their shipments.
Kind of hard to fight a war without guns and ammo.
It's got the eagle.
It's holding the anchor.
Obviously, it's Navy.
LAUREN: So what exactly are you looking for?
COREY HARRISON: I just wanna make sure they don't say made
in China or something on them.
But they're made by different people,
so that kind of makes me wonder if they're
all from the same period.
Do you have any idea of what you might want to get out of them?
I'm hoping 1,300.
$1,300.
Kind of in a predicament here.
I know with the Navy, they kept some of their uniforms
for almost a hundred years.
LAUREN: Oh wow.
COREY HARRISON: So you might have something really
cool here that could be worth a bunch of money or nothing
at all.
Well, hopefully, it's worth a bunch of money.
COREY HARRISON: I need to get somebody down here and kind of
tell me exactly what these buttons are
and how long they've been around.
LAUREN: So who are you gonna call
in to look at these buttons?
He's the administrator of the Clark
County Museum System, probably the smartest guy in the world.
All right, sounds good.
All right, I'll be right back.
LAUREN: OK, sounds good.
Accurately dating these buttons is really important.
If they're from the Civil War, they're
are a lot more collectible than they would be if they're
from the turn of the century.
That could mean the difference between zero money
and thousands of dollars.
MARK HALL-PATTON: Oh, interesting.
So the Navy played a big role in the Civil War, right?
MARK HALL-PATTON: Oh yeah.
If we hadn't have had the Union Navy,
we wouldn't have been able to blockade
all the ports in the South.
That made a huge difference.
It intercepted a lot of the firearms
that the South was trying to bring in.
So it was an effective force.
Most people, when they think of military in the Civil War,
they think about the Army.
They tend to forget the Navy.
And yet, the Union Navy had a huge part
in helping to defeat the South by blockading the ports,
by coming up the Mississippi River
and attacking from the river.
COREY HARRISON: Is there any way to actually tell
for sure they're Civil War?
I mean, they do look like they're
made by different people.
MARK HALL-PATTON: Yep, and that would make sense.
From 1850 to 1941, we didn't change
the design on these buttons.
Every time they'd need another batch of them,
different button companies would bid on them.
So what we have to look at in order
to tell whether they're Civil War is who made them
and how they mark them.
Oh, that's nice.
That one was actually made in London.
Now that's a different one.
Interesting.
And some of these are not easy.
Of what I'm seeing of the back stamps, given who did them--
Scoville, and Horsman and Sons, and some of these companies--
these are all major manufacturers.
I think these are Civil War buttons.
Wow.
MARK HALL-PATTON: They date right.
They're either 1850s or early 1860s.
They're not real common.
And the nice thing about this group
is that there are a number of different manufacturers.
And button collectors tend to want
a button from everybody who put out that button,
so it's a nice find.
- That's good to know. - Right on, Mark.
All right, you gave me everything I needed, buddy.
MARK HALL-PATTON (VOICEOVER): It was interesting to see
these buttons.
You know these came off a uniform.
Somebody wore these during the battles.
They're a tangible tie to that time period.
COREY HARRISON: You told me earlier 1,300.
I'm sure there's probably a grading system for these.
Pristine ones-- like this one I would say
is in really good shape, compared to this one,
not so much.
That being said, I'll start off around 200 bucks.
I've seen these types of buttons sell for thousands
and I've seen buttons sell for pennies.
It's really a crapshoot depending on the buyer,
so I gotta to be cautious with my offer.
LAUREN: How about 1,000?
Some had different values online than other ones.
COREY HARRISON: I think I can probably make
some decent money off of them.
It's just, it's gonna to take me a long time to do it.
I'll go up to $400.
I'm not paying any more, though.
I'm really not.
600 and you have a deal.
I'll pay you 5.
That's it.
All right, you got a deal. COREY HARRISON: Deal?
All right, cool.
You wanna pack these up and meet me over there?
LAUREN (VOICEOVER): All right.
I actually was expecting to be offered a lot less,
so $500 is definitely a good payoff.
It was worth a little bit of digging.