GUEST: Well, it's a bottle that my great-great-step grandfather received.

It's been a treasure throughout the family.

When I was a little girl, I used to ask my mom to bring it off the shelf so I could sit and just watch it and look at it and just kind of, you know, pay attention to, to the details and say, "I wonder what they're doing."

My mom passed away, um, almost six years ago.

This was the only thing that I wanted from her.

It warms my heart.

My mom's the best, so... APPRAISER: This was made by an itinerant artist called Carl Worner.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: If you want to talk about American folk art, to me, Carl Worner is the classic example of an itinerant artist who made things, really neat things, because he could, but also because that's how he subsisted.

I'm sure that your relative probably fed him, gave him some meat or something in exchange for this.

We don't have any records of...

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: If he was paid for any of this.

If you put a map of the United States up and you put a dot in every place that his stuff has been found and where it was made, it would go all over the Midwest and it would go all over New England.

GUEST: Oh, okay.

APPRAISER: And as far as we know, there's over a hundred of 'em in existence.

GUEST: Oh, wow.

Okay.

APPRAISER: It's more interesting than the vast majority of them.

For one thing, it's bigger, and it shows a meat market.

GUEST: It belonged to Seaver Erickson Smeby, who is my great-great step grandfather, um, who came from, uh, Norway and started the butcher shop.

APPRAISER: The most common ones are bars.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: 'Cause if you think about it, if he did one in a bar, he could, he could eat and drink.

GUEST: (laughing): Yeah.

APPRAISER: One of the things I always check when I look at one of these is to look under the bottom to make sure he didn't cut the bottom out to do it.

GUEST: Oh!

APPRAISER: And he, and he didn't.

And if you look at the width of every piece of wood in here, it had to go down through the neck of the bottle.

And how he ever assembled all that in there, your...

GUEST: I can't even imagine.

APPRAISER: Your guess is as good as mine.

But that's part of the fascination of the story.

He probably made this from wood scraps... ...and packing crates and whatever was available.

I was talking to one of the other guys at the folk art table who's really in tune with the current market, and he said that this, that Worner's work is starting to see an uptick in interest.

GUEST: Oh, no kidding.

APPRAISER: Because it's just such a slice of American history, a retail price on this would be in the $4,500 range.

GUEST: Oh, my gosh.

Wow.

(sniffles) Wow.

That's incredible.

My mom would be happy.

That's incredible.

Wow.

Wow.

APPRAISER: This is the third one of these...

GUEST: No kidding.

No kidding.

APPRAISER:...that we've appraised on ANTIQUES ROADSHOW.