Most vintage fishing lures in an old tackle box are worth a few dollars to a few hundred, and you can usually tell which is which before you ever look up a price. Check four things: what the body is made of, what kind of eyes it has, how the hooks are fastened, and whether the original box is still around. A wooden plug with glass eyes, in its own box, deserves a careful look. A plastic lure with painted eyes is probably something to fish.
I’ve run small boats on lakes and slow rivers for two decades, and old tackle boxes have a way of ending up with whoever in the family still trailers a boat to the ramp. I’m a fisherman, not an appraiser. The dates and prices below come from Bassmaster’s reporting on lure collecting, the National Fishing Lure Collectors Club, the histories of the makers, and one collector’s year-by-year history of a single lure. Where something is my opinion, I’ll say so.
Start With the Tackle Box, Not the Internet
Before you search a single lure, empty the box onto a towel on the kitchen table and sort it. Wood in one pile, metal in another, plastic in a third. Put anything still in a cardboard or wooden box off to the side, with its box. Don’t separate a lure from its box, even for a minute, because two loose items are worth less than the pair and you’ll never be sure which went with which.
Then leave them alone. Don’t scrub off the old line, don’t spray anything on the rust, and don’t touch up the paint. Bernie Schultz, a Bassmaster Elite Series pro and a serious collector, told Bassmaster that a huge amount of old tackle was simply thrown away by families who didn’t know it had value. The second way to lose that value is to “fix” a lure. A shiny new coat of paint turns a collectible into a fishing lure.
Take photos of each lure from the top, the side and the belly, in daylight. You’ll want them when you ask someone who knows more than you do.
Wood, Metal or Plastic
The body is your first rough date. American lure making grew up in wood. James Heddon, a Michigan beekeeper, is credited with carving some of the first wooden lures in the late 1890s; the story is that he whittled a stick, tossed it in a millpond and watched a bass hit it. By 1898 he was carving frogs from broomsticks, and the Heddon company started selling lures in 1902 out of Dowagiac, Michigan.
Plastic came later. Heddon introduced its first plastic lures in 1932 and called them Spooks, after their see-through look. Those early plastics didn’t hold up. Many decayed, and the ones that survived are often bubbled and warped, which is exactly why a clean early Spook brings a premium today. Creek Chub, the big Indiana maker, carved its lures from wood for decades and only started experimenting with plastic in the 1950s and ’60s.
Metal lures go back further than both. The most expensive lure ever sold is a hollow copper fish made before the Civil War, and I’ll get to that one. In my experience, though, most metal in an old box is spoons and spinners, and most of those are fishing tackle, not treasure.
Read the Eyes First
If I could only look at one thing on a wooden lure, it would be the eyes. Makers changed eye styles over the decades, and the changes line up with dates closely enough to narrow a lure down fast. The best worked example I’ve found is South Bend’s Bass-Oreno, a lure that first showed up in 1915 and stayed in production for most of the century. A history written by a collector, with help from a South Bend expert in the NFLCC, walks through every version.
- No eyes from 1915 to about 1925. The first ones were only 3 1/2 inches long.
- Glass eyes from about 1926 to 1934, set into the wood.
- Tack eyes, a painted tack pushed into the head, from about 1935 to 1942 and again from 1947 to 1950.
- Carved or pressed eyes from 1951 to about 1966.
- Painted eyes from about 1967 on. If you find a Bass-Oreno with painted eyes, it was made by Gladding-South Bend after 1966. Gladding had bought South Bend in 1964, and the Luhr Jensen company took over the line in 1982.
That order, glass, then tack, then simpler eyes, shows up across a lot of old wooden lures, but the exact years belong to each maker and each model. Treat the Bass-Oreno dates as a pattern, not a rule for every plug in your box.
Then Look at the Hooks and Hardware
Turn the lure over. The little fittings that hold the hooks to the body are called hook hangers, and they changed too. On the Bass-Oreno, the earliest hooks hung from plain screw eyes bent shut, so you couldn’t swap a hook without tools. In 1919 South Bend went to what it called easy-off hardware, a screw eye left open so an angler could change hooks. In the mid-1920s that hardware was cut to a sharper point. From 1951 the lure carried surface-rig hardware, a flat plate screwed onto the body, and kept it to 1982.
Even the small cups around the hangers tell you something. On the Bass-Oreno they were left bare until the early 1930s, painted from about 1932 to 1942, and bare again after the war. I wouldn’t have believed anyone tracked details that small until I read it. Collectors do, and that’s why a lure with replaced hooks or new screws loses a good part of its appeal to them. If the hardware looks brighter than the rest of the lure, somebody has probably been in there.
The Makers Worth Knowing
Four names come up again and again in old boxes and in collectors’ talk. Knowing a little about each one tells you what to look for on the lure itself.
Heddon started in Dowagiac in 1902 and had a factory there and a Canadian distributor by 1904. The Heddon family sold the business in 1955, and the brand has changed hands several times since. Here’s the catch: several of its classic lures, including the Lucky 13, the Zara Spook and the River Runt, are still made today. A Zara Spook in your box might be from the 1930s or from last spring, so the eyes and hardware matter more than the name.
Creek Chub grew out of a lure three Indiana fishermen made in 1906, and the company was founded in Garrett, Indiana, in 1916. Its Wiggler patent was filed in 1915 and granted in 1920. Much of its workforce was women, who painted lures that got as many as 14 or 15 coats of primer, paint and lacquer. By 1936 it sold in 48 foreign countries and held 32 patents, and it made more than 300 varieties of lures over its life. The Lazy Ike company bought it in 1978, and the factory closed by 1979.
South Bend is the Bass-Oreno maker above, and its long production run makes it one of the easier names to date.
Riley Haskell, a gunsmith from Painesville, Ohio, made metal lures in the 1850s. You won’t find one in a garage box. I’m including him because his name explains the top of the market.
The Box Can Be Worth More Than the Lure
This surprised me more than anything else I read. Karl White, Bassmaster’s longtime antique tackle expert, told the magazine that “normally the box is worth more than the bait because it’s oftentimes more rare.” People fished the lure and threw the box away, so fewer boxes survived.
Kerry Chatham, an Alabama collector, put a number on it: on a rare piece, a box in good shape can add another 50 percent to the value. Rob Pavey, the author of a book on Heddon lures, pointed out that boxes often carry patent dates, which help date the lure inside. He also said some sought-after boxes have sold for more than $30,000 without the lure. So if you find old cardboard boxes in a tackle box, empty or not, keep every one of them, flattened and torn ones included.
Condition Is Most of the Price
Two copies of the same lure can be worth very different amounts depending on how hard they were fished. Collectors grade condition, and what they’re looking at is mostly the paint: how much of the original finish is left, how many chips and hook scratches it has, whether the wood has cracked, whether the hardware has rusted. A lure that was repainted, even nicely, falls to the bottom of any collector’s grading because the original finish is gone.
That’s why I said not to clean anything. A soft dry brush to knock off dust is the most I’d do before someone who knows looks at it. Store them dry and out of the sun, and keep them out of a hot truck bed and away from the transom of a boat that sits outside. Old wood swells and cracks with moisture, and old paint lifts. On a plug left in a damp boat box all summer, it’s usually the paint that broke first, long before the wood gives.
Bassmaster’s experts also warned that misrepresented and counterfeit lures turn up now and then. A lure that looks too perfect for its age deserves a second opinion before money changes hands.
The $101,200 Lure, and Why Yours Probably Isn’t
In November 2003, a 10-inch copper Haskell Minnow sold through Lang’s for $101,200, the record for a fishing lure at auction. Riley Haskell made it in 1859. It’s hollow, with sculpted fins and gills and a spinning tail section, weighs about 12 ounces and came in its original wooden box stamped “R. Haskell.” Bassmaster reported that it was the only one of that size known, nearly double the size of the other Haskell Minnows anyone had found.
The record before it was a 1920s Chautauqua Minnow that sold on eBay for $45,855 in 2002. The man who bought the Haskell sold it about two months later to Kerry Chatham, who told Bassmaster he’d turned down an offer of half a million dollars for it.
I’m telling you this so you know where the ceiling is, not so you go looking for it. What made the Haskell worth that much was a pile of things at once: an early American maker, a one-of-a-kind size, near-perfect condition and the original box. The lures that sell for real money tend to stack several of those. A common lure that was fished hard and has no box is usually worth more on the end of your line than at auction.
Where to Get a Real Answer
Price guides are a start. Kovels lists more than 2,200 prices in its fishing category online. Karl White’s own method, he told Bassmaster, was to take an average from the price books and then add a little if the book was old. His rule of thumb was that “everything doubles in 10 years.” That’s one expert’s habit, not a law of the market, but it explains why an old price guide often reads low.
For a real answer, go to the people. The National Fishing Lure Collectors Club has been around since 1976 as a nonprofit, educational club, and it covers reels, rods, catalogs and minnow buckets as well as lures. A one-year US membership is $35, and a paperless one is $25. Members can go to the national meeting and regional shows, which is where you can set a lure on a table and have three people who’ve held a hundred of them tell you what it is.
As for the lures you keep to fish: I’d happily fish any common one that’s already been repainted or beaten up. It was made to be on the water, and it still catches. If you want a modern box to put them in, my small-box system for a tackle box keeps old and new apart. If you’re not sure what kind of lure you’re holding, the guide to fishing lure types sorts crankbaits from jerkbaits and spoons. And when the water turns cold, the old crankbaits still have a job; I wrote up where bass hold in winter and what they’ll bite.
Just do the sorting, the photos and the asking before anything goes in the water. Once a rare one is lost off a snag, nobody can get it back for you.
