In our basement there’s an area under the stairs that’s been completely walled up and can only be accessed by awkwardly crawling on all fours under where the breaker panel is mounted (which is a little freaky). This fact alone isn’t all that strange - I’m sure there’s many houses that have walled up areas under their basement stairs. What make this particular walling up is that whoever did the job left stuff in there before sealing it off!

Now, upon a cursory glance, there isn’t much of interest: some old paint cans, a crappy work-light, a roll of what appears to be some kind of insulation, dirt, cobwebs, etc. We never really paid it much heed. However during my recent day of cabling I had to run some of the feed though there so went bravely crawling under the breaker panel (with the dustbuster to remove the cobwebs - yuk) to pull the feeds through.

While I was in there, I took advantage of the time and check out more completely what was sealed under there along with the dirt and cobwebs. As we suspected - there was crap, crap, and more crap. However, in among the crap was a box with something shiny in it. Never one to turn away from something shiny, I investigated further.

It turned out to be a box full of very tarnished metal serving dishes (and one raggedy doily, which I threw out). After we pulled all the pieces out, there was actually quite a collection!

Granted, I don’t know a lot about these kinds of things, but my instinct is telling me that this is silver-plated copper. The majority of the pieces have an inscription on the bottom that says “E.P. Copper” and some of them have what I think is a manufacturer’s symbol as well. I believe that they’re mostly made in Canada, but I think that the carafe (in the upper right of the photo) may be English. Shannon thinks with with some silver polish and a little elbow-grease, these might actually manage to look okay.

I took a few photos of the more legible inscriptions on the bottom of the pieces, they’re pretty worn down but some of them are quite clear.

Inscription on the carafe (top right of the group photo)
Inscription on the platter (bottom middle of the group photo)
Inscription on the tureen (far left of the group photo)

I did a little research on web and figure that all of these pieces are probably as common as paper-clips, but these treasures were still pretty cool to find buried under all the rest of the junk under the stairs. If any one out there knows anything about any of the pieces shown here or can at least direct us where to look to find out more, we’d certainly be glad to hear from you! The comment board is always open.

Garr.

That’s a pirate noise, by the way.

-Ted.