I've got tons of this rare product to sell but who to and where?

Hello everyone. I have about 20 of these Railroad telegraph pole insulators and can find about 100 or so if i tried. Where I live the Katy Railroad went through in the 1860s and these green/blue glass insulators are over 115 years old each and look really cool and like they came out of an Indiana Jones movie since they look sorta like those Shankira stones oddly out of The Temple of Doom one and are the perfect size for paper weights. I'm wondering though even though people collect them as are Id like to modify them to fill in the base to make them heavier to make them into a great conversation piece and a weighty odd looking paper weight with historic and artistic appeal. If anyone needs to know what they look like i can email pictures. Please dont tell me to sell them on ebay because I want to find a place where people would actually use them and not just store them in a dusty old box which most collectors unfortunately do. Around here they are pretty common to find when digging around the old railroad tracks that were taken out about 60 years ago but in the big cities many people havent even seen anything like them before. Sorry for the length of this post but who has a lot of paper work that would enjoy a unique and priceless historical paper weight? Any suggestions and advice is greatly appreciated in advance. Thanks TJ Wass

I know the collector's book on the insulators is titled "Jewels of the Wire", but don't remember any specific collectors club.

You might try a Google search. If they have a newletter or ezine for the members, you could see about placing an ad. At the same time, someone with a serious collection could probably give you a current market value on them before you modify all of them.

Some purists want their jewels as original as possible.

A classier way of displaying them is as a pen dest set. You cut a nice board from walnut, oak, or other attractive wood, attach one of the screw mount pieces to hold the insulator on one side and a pen and pen mount on the other. They can then be taken to "Things Remembered" or a trophy shop to have a personalized nameplate added. (A serious collector can point you in the right direction to find some original or reproduction screw mounts.

Would that Katy RR have run to or through Houston?

Dennis Bevers




What I do when not reading and posting on 7 different forums!

> Hello everyone. I have about 20 of these
> Railroad telegraph pole insulators and can
> find about 100 or so if i tried. Where I
> live the Katy Railroad went through in the
> 1860s and these green/blue glass insulators
> are over 115 years old each................
> suggestions and advice is greatly
> appreciated in advance. Thanks TJ Wass

TJ,

IMHO: You need to check the value of them before you modify. Most of those are fairly common and not worth too much; so modify away. Some, however are quite rare and valuable; the odd one could be worth 200 of the common ones. You don't want to find that out right after you turn it into a paperweight, candleholder, or whatever. Some do end up in dusty boxes (mostly the common ones), but the good collectors get the wood screw mounts and display them all mounted on nice boards, labeled and all. Those are the guys who will happily pay real well for the rare one they don't have. I think it's great to find cool uses for antiques, but one should always think twice before seriously altering, modifying, in any way. Just refinishing the old cruddy varnish off something can sometimes decrease the value by a huge amount. Probably not the case with glass insulators, but worth doing your homework on. The price of the rare ones will shock you. They do make nice paperweights, the bigger ones especially. At least with the internet, research is 1,000 times easier than it used to be.(And a million times faster.)
Have fun with them, Dave Horn

PS: I don't know if you're actually getting them off the old poles, if so sometimes the original wood screw mounts can add to the value. And some collectors want the old original mounts for all the rest of their glass, which usually out lives the posts. A 100 yr old mount in usable shape is always preferable to a reproduction. In dry climates they can survive amazingly well.


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