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| David Hall, co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Service, poses with some of 1,427 Gold-Rush era U.S. gold coins, at his office in Santa Ana, Calif., Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014. A California couple out walking their dog on their property stumbled across the modern-day bonanza: $10 million in rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree. Nearly all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in uncirculated, mint condition, said Hall, who recently authenticated them. Although the face value of the gold pieces only adds up to about $27,000, some of them are so rare that coin experts say they could fetch nearly $1 million apiece. |
LOS ANGELES
(AP) -- A Northern California couple out walking their dog on their
property stumbled across a modern-day bonanza: $10 million in rare,
mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree.
Nearly
all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in uncirculated,
mint condition, said David Hall, co-founder of Professional Coin Grading
Service of Santa Ana, which recently authenticated them. Although the
face value of the gold pieces only adds up to about $27,000, some of
them are so rare that coin experts say they could fetch nearly $1
million apiece.
"I don't like to say
once-in-a-lifetime for anything, but you don't get an opportunity to
handle this kind of material, a treasure like this, ever," said veteran
numismatist Don Kagin, who is representing the finders. "It's like they
found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."
Kagin,
whose family has been in the rare-coin business for 81 years, would say
little about the couple other than that they are husband and wife, are
middle-aged and have lived for several years on the rural property in
California's Gold Country, where the coins were found. They have no idea
who put them there, he said.
The pair are
choosing to remain anonymous, Kagin said, in part to avoid a renewed
gold rush to their property by modern-day prospectors armed with metal
detectors.
They also don't want to be treated any differently, said David McCarthy, chief numismatist for Kagin Inc. of Tiburon.
"Their
concern was this would change the way everyone else would look at them,
and they're pretty happy with the lifestyle they have today," he said.
They
plan to put most of the coins up for sale through Amazon while holding
onto a few keepsakes. They'll use the money to pay off bills and quietly
donate to local charities, Kagin said.
Before
they sell them, they are loaning some to the American Numismatic
Association for its National Money Show, which opens Thursday in
Atlanta.
What makes their find particularly
valuable, McCarthy said, is that almost all of the coins are in
near-perfect condition. That means that whoever put them into the ground
likely socked them away as soon as they were put into circulation.
Because
paper money was illegal in California until the 1870s, he added, it's
extremely rare to find any coins from before that of such high quality.
"It
wasn't really until the 1880s that you start seeing coins struck in
California that were kept in real high grades of preservation," he said.
The
coins, in $5, $10 and $20 denominations, were stored more or less in
chronological order in six cans, McCarthy said, with the 1840s and 1850s
pieces going into one can until it was filed, then new coins going into
the next one and the next one after that. The dates and the method
indicated that whoever put them there was using the ground as their
personal bank and that they weren't swooped up all at once in a robbery.
Although most of the coins were minted in San Francisco, one $5 gold piece came from as far away as Georgia.
Kagin
and McCarthy would say little about the couple's property or its
ownership history, other than it's located in Gold Country, a sprawling,
picturesque and still lightly populated section of north-central
California that stretches along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.
The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, about 50 miles northeast of Sacramento, set off the California Gold
Rush of 1848.
The
coins had been buried by a path the couple had walked for years. On the
day they found them last spring, the woman had bent over to examine an
old rusty can that erosion had caused to pop slightly out of the ground.
"Don't be above bending over to check on a rusty can," Kagin said she told him.
They
were located on a section of the property the couple nicknamed Saddle
Ridge, and Kagin is calling the find the Saddle Ridge Hoard. He believes
it could be the largest such discovery in U.S. history.
One
of the largest previous finds of gold coins was $1 million worth
uncovered by construction workers in Jackson, Tenn., in 1985. More than
400,000 silver dollars were found in the home of a Reno, Nev., man who
died in 1974 and were later sold intact for $7.3 million.
Gold
coins and ingots said to be worth as much as $130 million were
recovered in the 1980s from the wreck of the SS Central America. But
historians knew roughly where that gold was because the ship went down
off the coast of North Carolina during a hurricane in 1857.
