A San Antonio field guide
San Antonio Antiques and Collectibles
San Antonio has always been a good city to hunt in. Its limestone Victorians and Spanish colonial houses shed doors, hardware, and mantels that turn up as architectural salvage, and the estates behind them carry silver, jewelry, coins, and the small collectibles that reward a careful eye.
This guide starts where the city's antique trade started, in architectural salvage, and follows the collector outward: into antique furniture, the estate collectibles that surface when a house is cleared, and the categories worth knowing well before you buy or sell. Those categories are jewelry and sterling silver, then coins and currency, then the gold and silver that trade on both collectible and metal value, and finally the auctions that tie buying and selling together.
Nothing here is an appraisal or an offer. The aim is to teach you how to look: how to date a salvaged door, how to read a silver hallmark, how coin grading actually works, and how to tell collectible value from melt value. Where a figure appears, it is a general educational range with its basis stated, not a price.