From your "handle", I would gather you are in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Aside from having lived and worked in the UP over 40 years ago, I still go back there to visit friends & family.
I defer to John Oder, who is the head guru on old lathes like you have pictured. Briefly, you have an OLD American Tool Works Lathe. It is known as a "geared head engine lathe". 16" is the "swing", or the approximate maximum diameter of work the lathe can "swing" over the bedways. The other dimension to get is the "distance between centers". This is the distance from a center point mounted in the headstock spindle to a center point mounted in the tailstock, with the tailstock at the extreme limit of its travel on the bedways.
Your lathe has what are known as "plain bearings", along with some very heavy internal gearing. It is not able to be run at the higher speeds that smaller diameter work and the use of carbide cutting tools require. It also has what is known as a "threaded spindle nose". American Tool Works used a system of tapers along with the threaded spindle nose unique to their lathes. Unless there are other chucks and faceplates for that lathe, getting additional chucks and faceplates to mount on that spindle will require either: finding used ones from a similar ATW lathe; or, some involved machine work to make backing plates from scratch with the mating tapers and threads.
The lathe likely came out of one of the iron mines machine shops, or else it came out of a railroad roundhouse or shop. In the UP, in about 1958 - 60, the Soo Line Railroad cleaned out their steam locomotive maintenance equipment from their roundhouses. In the process, a lot of older US made machine tools such as your lathe got sold off or given to employees to haul them away. At least one working machine shop in the UP started in business in about 1962 using machine tools from a Soo Line roundhouse and shop.
As to value: your lathe is an old workhorse. It does have the taper attachment, which is a plus. It has plenty of iron and can handle heavy jobs easily. As for accuracy, that is another matter. A good machinist who knows how to work with older machine tools could get surprisingly accurate work out on your lathe, while the next guy would run the other way. It is strictly a lathe for heavier jobs, and the long bed is also a plus.
Value is a funny topic. The UP may well be a near desert in terms of used machine tools at this point in time. For a Yooper to get used heavier US made machine tools might mean heading towards the Twin Cities, Chicago, or Milwaukee. If the UP is not a place where people can easily find used heavy US made machine tools, then this drives the price up- provided the right person in the UP is looking for a lathe of this type. I do not know if all the gearing and mechanisms work correctly, but I did not see any broken or brazed levers or knobs ( a sign of mishandling or abuse along the way). Assuming the lathe to be in serviceable or usable condition and not expecting a high degree of accuracy from it, I'd say a price of $600-750.00 would seem reasonable. There is a LOT of iron in that old lathe, and moving it will require a tilt bed truck or similar, so the average guy wanting an old lathe for his shop out in the garage or basement is not going to be interested in this one. Someone doing driveshaft work or possibly metal spraying on long shafts or doing weld buildup on long shafts might want this lathe. It's a good old horse, and like an old workhorse, it likely has a swayback and is a bit loose in the joints, but still up to a hard pull.
I can't resist asking: if you have means of keeping welding electrode warm and dry in your shop: is it an old refrigerator with a light bulb hung in it ? and: if you heat with a wood stove, do you warm pasties and keep a coffee pot on it in winter ? Both things seemed to be almost universal in the UP when I'd find a weld shop or machine shop. I worked on the construction of a powerplant (Presque Isle Station Units 7,8,9) at Marquette, MI. In winter, we used to bring pasties for lunch and warm them either on the engine blocks of cranes, or in a welding rod oven (never mind the fact the moisture cooking out of the pasties might have been absorbed into the flux on the low hydrogen electrodes in the same oven). A lot of good memories of my time in the UP, for sure.
