Need help identifying this spoon and maybe some history on it. I don’t know if it’s worth selling. Any help would be appreciated. I’m new.
Mermod, Jaccard, and Co. were an American firm active in the last quarter of the 19th Century. Not highly collected, but it is sterling, so weigh it! The current spot price of silver is about $1 per gram, so it’s worth at least that much (less the buyer’s margin). Interesting design, so it might have some decorative value beyond the melt value. Look for listings on eBay, but pay no attention to the “buy it now” prices, which are often the product of a lot of wishful thinking. Look only at the “sold” listings.
Thank you!! You’re a life saver!
Perhaps it’s the time of the year but here I am in Southwestern Ontario surrounded by fields of ripening corn (maize) and I not only rather like this nicely-figured cob spoon I consider it one of the best enamel and silver spoon I have seen.
The Jaccard family are descendants of a Swiss watchmaker who immigrated. to the US. Here’s a detailed synoptic of the various companies by Jaccard family members.
The Jaccard Companies | NAWCC Forums.
I have been lucky enough to collect several of Jaccard watches. They are of the Swiss highest standard and, in my opinion, for whatever it’s worth, this cob spoon falls into the same category.
Cob spoons have an interesting niche market in North America. I have seen spoons made by silversmiths in what is now Ontario by designers and smiths working about fifteen hundred years ago and included in burial domestic implements recovered from communities taking them as trade goods in what is now the Southern United States about 1200 miles to the south of the mine.
The spoons are traceable from silver mined in Cobalt, Ontario, a mine just north of Toronto which provided almost all of the silver used to finance WWI.
The mine largely fell into desuetude not because of lack of silver but because the veins were so broad they were being used to hold up the mine itself. Now of course it is Cobalt everyone is after and the Silver recovered incidentally sits in a room and awaits shipment to the Ottawa Mint for coinage.
Nothing much was known about this mine by settler’s from Europe until the owners defending the town from the invading forces ran out or lead and substituted silver for the musket balls. … Surgeons extracting the balls from the bodies of the shot soldiers, urged a quick treaty and the take over of the mine.
There are, I suppose, some 20 million dead in WWI who might has wished they didn’t.
I … rather like this nicely-figured cob spoon…
You’re not alone. I was struck by the design, but not knowing anything about the collector market for cob spoons, it’s tough to put a number on if. Sterling souvenir spoons by Jaccard, commemorating things like the 1904 World’s Fair, seem to fetch something in the $50 range. I can’t find anything exactly like this on eBay, however.
It’s one of those things that, if I spotted it in a tray of odds and ends at an estate sale, I would grab quickly, before anyone else saw it. 