A silver coffee pot made by Paul Revere could be yours for $1.2 million

The exquisite coffee pot was made about 250 years ago, crafted out of 40 ounces of silver, formed and engraved by the finest silversmith in the American colonies.

It is a foot tall. It has a pine cone-style finial on the lid, a curved spout with a seashell motif, and, near the top, the maker’s mark: “Revere.”

In 1775, the year that Paul Revere galloped through the night to warn Massachusetts colonists that the British were coming, experts believe he may have made the elegant piece of silverware.

Now as the country marks the 250th anniversary of his ride and the start of the Revolutionary War next month, his rare silver pot has just gone up for sale: Price $1.2 million.

The piece, which from 1980 to 2014 was on display in Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, is being sold by M.S. Rau, a fine arts, antiques and jewelry dealer in New Orleans.

Bill Rau, owner of the 113-year-old firm, said he acquired the object several weeks ago after it was sold at the Sotheby’s auction house in New York in January for $444,000. Sotheby’s declined to name that buyer.

“We were very fortunate to get it,” Rau said. Revere’s work “has brought in the millions at auction before.”

Revere was a colonial American renaissance man, Rau said in a recent telephone interview.

Not only did Revere make his harrowing ride to warn of the British, he was also a businessman and craftsman who worked with a number of metals.

He made silverware, copper sheeting, church bells, cannons, tongs, dentures, shoe buckles, surgical instruments, and, at least once, a chain for a pet squirrel, according to the website of the Paul Revere House, in Boston.

He engraved money and propaganda images, including a famous version of the 1770 Boston Massacre. He was courier and a leader in the anti-British resistance in Boston in the turbulent days before the Revolutionary War broke out.

His portrait was painted by John Singleton Copley in 1768. And years later he was celebrated in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere …

Revere did not actually yell, “the British are coming!” according to historian David Hackett Fischer’s 1994 book, “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

The British soldiers who were marching from Boston to Lexington and Concord on April 18 and 19, 1775, would have been known as “regulars,” or “redcoats,” Fischer wrote.

“No messenger is known … to have cried ‘the British are coming’ until the grandfathers’ tales” emerged long after Independence, he wrote.

There were other riders on those and on other days. In 1777, a 16-year-old girl named Sybil Ludington is said to have ridden to alert patriots after a British raid in Danbury, Connecticut.

But Longfellow’s famous poem helped ensure Revere’s ride is the best known.

And no matter what Revere yelled, he was a patriot and an artisan, Rau said.

As a the son of a silversmith, Revere “was the only person in all of the Americas that could take a piece of silver from a silver ingot and make it into a finished product,” Rau said. “There was nobody else with that skill in all of the Americas, north or south America.”

As a historic figure he is one of best known from the period of the Revolution, he said.

“Who do we have?” Rau said. “We have Washington. Nobody would have known Hamilton, except for the play. Maybe Hamilton. Obviously Franklin. Maybe John Hancock, because he wrote his name big. Maybe John Adams. And Paul Revere.”

“So we’re dealing with one of the most famous names in American history,” he said.

“If this was an English silver coffee pot of the same period, it would be worth $25,000,” he said.

In 1775, Revere’s coffee pot would have cost the rough equivalent of the average worker’s pay for two years, he said.

It was made, and hand engraved, for a Newburyport, Massachusetts, doctor, Micajah Sawyer.

The piece stayed in the Sawyer family for over 200 years, Rau said. It was sold in the spring of 1980 to a collector who then lent it to the Virginia museum, which he said has the best collection of silver in the country. It was removed from the collection after the lender died, he said.

Revere’s April ride came as elements of the British army occupying Boston slipped out of town that night on what they hoped would be a quick raid into the countryside.

Historians believe their aims were to seize a cache of the colonists’ military goods at Concord, 18 miles away, and, the patriots thought, to bag the patriots Sam Adams and John Hancock, who were then in nearby Lexington.

The raid was no secret. Revere had friends show two lanterns in the steeple of the Boston’s Old North Church to signal that the British were sneaking out of town by boat.

Then he rode to spread the word - sparking a series of alerts by couriers across the outskirts of Boston, Fischer wrote. Colonists fired muskets, rang bells, and started signal fires.

Revere, riding a borrowed horse named Brown Beauty, dodged one checkpoint, and got to Lexington, where he warned Adams and Hancock that “the Regulars are coming out!” Fischer wrote. Revere then headed off to warn Concord.

In the darkness he was quickly captured by members of a British patrol who threatened to “blow my brains out,” he recalled later, according to Fischer’s account.

When Revere convinced the British that they were in danger from the armed and angry colonists who were gathering, they took his horse, let him go, and fled.

Revere, now on foot, made his way to back Lexington, where the colonists would make their fateful stand later that morning.

He checked in on Hancock and Adams who were preparing to leave, and was tasked with lugging a trunk full of sensitive patriot documents to safety from the nearby tavern where it was stored.

“With his gift for being at the center of events, he happened to be crossing Lexington green at the moment when the British troops arrived,” Fischer wrote.

As Revere and a comrade carried the trunk away, British soldiers and armed colonists faced each other nearby.

“Lay down your arms, you damned rebels!” a British officer yelled.

None of the colonists complied, Fisher wrote.

Revere wrote later that as he and his comrade worked, he heard a single gun shot. He was unable to say for sure from which side it came.

“We shall never know who fired first at Lexington, or why,” Fischer wrote. It may even have been an accidental discharge. “But everyone on the Common saw what happened next.”

The redcoats opened up, cutting down the patriots, who returned scattered fire. Of the 60 or 70 armed colonists, seven were killed and nine were wounded.

Only one British soldier was wounded, Fischer wrote. The “regulars” cheered the victory and marched off to Concord, where their joy would be tempered later that day by a bloody rout at the hands of the colonists.

The war for American independence was on.

Paul Revere later had a brief and undistinguished career as a military commander.

After the war he returned to his silversmith shop in Boston and expanded his business. His death in 1818 was mourned as the passing of an age, Fischer wrote. But his legend was just beginning. Eighty-five years after the ride, on the eve of the Civil War, Longfellow wrote:

So through the night rode Paul Revere …

A cry of defiance and not of fear

A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,

And a word that shall echo forevermore!