GUEST: My great-grandfather purchased it at a flea market for one dollar in South Paris, Maine in the 1920s.

APPRAISER: Well, what you have here is a Dutch musket.

The original variant of these guns had iron furniture.

This has a brass butt plate and trigger guard.

So it's a little bit later.

But the Dutch were making these certainly by about 1730.

Which probably dates its production to circa 1735 to 1745.

The Netherlands was one of the largest sources of firearms during that period, really on until the advent of the Birmingham gun trade in the mid-19th century in England.

The Dutch guns of this period are often thought to be copies of British Brown Bess-type muskets.

But the reality is, is the Dutch were using these patterns actually a little bit earlier than the British.

And in many ways, their design sort of influenced what becomes known as the Brown Bess musket circa 1730 when they officially adopt a pattern for the Long Land Pattern musket for the British military.

The best part about this gun, other than that it's completely untouched, hasn't had anything done to it, and remains an original flint, is the marking on top of the barrel that says "S.

Carolina."

South Carolina starts off as a British colony.

The colonies were important to the British, but they weren't necessarily worth spending a lot of money on in terms of their defense.

So as early as 1731, the British government started buying used Dutch muskets to arm the colonials.

The gun almost certainly came here from a British purchase.

Probably around the time of the, uh, Seven Years' War, better known as the French and Indian War here.

One of the ways we know that the gun was actually purchased out of a Dutch arsenal is that on the barrel at the end, there is a rack number that was the Dutch arsenal rack number for the gun.

Dutch musket, unmarked, just original flintlock Dutch musket in kind of attic condition.

The gun would probably sell somewhere in the range of $3,000 to $5,000, maybe a little bit more.

GUEST: Wow.

APPRAISER: But it gets a whole lot better because of that mark.

I think a conservative auction estimate for this gun is between $20,000 and $30,000.

GUEST: Oh, my goodness, I was not expecting that whatsoever.

APPRAISER: I would probably insure it in the range of $30,000 to $35,000.

It's an incredibly difficult gun to replace.

There are only a handful of known examples, and this is the best marked one I have seen.

GUEST: Wow, really?

APPRAISER: It's just everything that makes my heart go aflutter when I see a, just a, a wonderful piece of history like this.