Stories like this make me want to sleuth.
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Based on the dates of the coins included in the find, their condition and the condition of the decaying metal cans protecting them, it is believed that the coins were buried over a significant period of time in the late 19th century.
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Many pieces were finer than anything known in major collections or museums.
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"The family and the attorneys researched who might have put them there, and they came up with nothing," Kagin said. "The nearest we can guess is that whoever left the coins might have been involved in the mining industry." He also reckons the cans were buried at various times.
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About a third of the coins were in pristine condition, having never been circulated
8 cans, 1427 coins, dated 1847-1894. 1373 $20, 50 $10, 4 $5. Face value $27980. One-third of the coins UNC. What we know so far from the press release, 1866 (2), 1873, 1877, 1888 (4), 1889 (2), and 1894, all finest or tied for finest known.
Today's "face value" of that $27980 would be about $750,000. Who buries three-quarters of a million dollars in the ground? Over a period of almost 50 years? We know with some certainty that at least two of the coins (1866) came straight from a bank (or the mint?) almost 30 years before the last date in the cache.
There were an average of 178 coins in each can, face value $3500, today's value almost a hundred grand. Did this person save up almost a hundred grand somewhere else and then return to bury a full can? Did they repeatedly return to the site and dig up a can just to add a few coins? That seems unlikely.
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John: Years ago, on our first hike, we noticed an old tree growing into the hill. It had an empty rusty can hanging from it that the tree had grown around â€" that was right at the site where we found the coins... At the time we thought the can might be a place for someone to put flowers in for a gravesite â€" something which would have been typical at the time.
There was also an unusual angular rock up the hill from where the coins were buried â€" we'd wondered what in the heck it was.
Mary: It wasn't until we made the find that we realized it might have been a marker: starting at the rock, if you walk 10 paces towards the North Star, you wind up smack in the middle of the coins!
Three of the cans pictured together all look the same. Another picture shows three cans of very different sizes. How were the coins stacked in the cans? Dates similar in each, or random throughout? I can't help thinking this was buried loot from a train or bank robbery, yet we've got mint-state coins covering 30 years. If it was a regular Joe with a job, from 1847 to 1894 he was able to save $600 a year, or an average of $11 a week. That seems extraordinary for times when the average wage was $1-2 a day.
The distribution of denominations also seems strange to me - 96% are $20 coins. It's almost like a mint employee was stealing one every two weeks. But then where did the two-thirds that are circulated come from? So, I can't help but keep coming back to the idea that it was one or more train robberies. Who else dies and leaves three-quarters of a million dollars in the ground? What kind of person, who could accumulate that kind of wealth between 1847 and 1894, buries it in the ground?
Too bad that it doesn't sound like an archaeologist was involved. I think it's funny that the first thing the couple did was to rebury it somewhere else.
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Posted 02/25/2014 5:32 pm
