I bid on an anvil at a local online auction sight. It looked like a decent one, I could tell it needed some TLC and a lot of work. I didn't know the weight but judging from the size of the other items in the pictures I could tell it was a good sized one. I was hoping it would be at least a 100lbs'er. I bid up to $270, but won at $260. With a 10% buyer's fee it ended being $286 total.
 
Well, I was very surprised by what I found. I put it on the bathroom scale when I got home with it and it weighed out at 152lbs (the hundred weight marks say it was 155lbs originally)! I was happy by that point. Then I got to looking at it a little closer, turns out its a Peter Wright! Ecstatic! It does need work, more than I thought actually, but the rebound is great and it rings like a xxxxxxx bell. The edges are pretty torn up, one side has a chunk broken off and another piece cracked. The face is mostly smooth with a few pits, but its flat as a granite slab, no swayback. The horn and face both have what looks like a bit welding slag on them, but a grinder will take care of that quickly. I hit it with a cupped wire wheel on my angle grinder and cleaned it up, which it did pretty nicely. I'll hit it with a straight wheel later and see if it'll clean up more. I also popped that socket out quite easily by heating it up nice and hot and beating the xxxx out of it from the bottom.
 
I haven't found a date on it anywhere, but there is a number 3 stamped on one of the legs. I did find some markings that I thought might be a date stamp, the middle character looks like a 4, but there are what appear to be two 1s on either side of it, I highly doubt its a circa 1141 or 1411. The  folks on a couple Facebook blacksmithing groups have guesstimated it to be roughly pre-1850's. One gentleman speculated that it looked like a multi-piece anvil that PW stopped making in the 1850's.
 
Oh, time for the math, $286 / 152# = $1.88 per pound! That's a heck of a deal around here. People want $400-$800 for no-name anvils, weighing less, and sometimes in worse shape.
 
Questions,
A. What's your guess on the age?
B. Can you give me ballpark value?
3. The feet are a little steeper than I usually see, what's the best way to anchor one like this?
 
Well here are the gratuitous pictures, there are a lot of them, just to warn you.

Best way to clean the face of the anvil is to forge hot metal on it for several hours. No loss of face thickness and it will shine like new metal.

AIA indicates that style of Peter Wright is from 1830-1852.

Nice, an early PW.

Congrats! Use it and love it!

Congratulations

Question B can only you answer, or maybe in hopefully distant future you heirs.

Not grinding the anvil is one thing, but I think its safe to say that you can remove those 2 welding spots 

A hammer and chisel will knock those weld spots off. Good looking anvil 

Value? Currently $286. It is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

Don't worry about making it look new, just use it. Dress the edges with a grinder to smooth them up, and to decrease the chances of further chipping. If they need more than a light dressing, work around the really bad sections. Plenty of good room to work on that face.

Great buy! A lot of history there. And what character it has.
Don't know where that '25' comes from. A quarter is 28lbs.