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Coins in St. Lucy's bowl |
Back in the summer of 2012, I attended the “World’s Fair of Money,”
the annual convention of the American Numismatic Association. Actually, I just
attended the exhibit hall to ogle the rare coins. I’ve collected coins since I
was a child, basically for the beauty and artistry of the objects, their
intrinsic value. (I must add that my entire collection is rather mundane, since
the extrinsic value of these objects
has prevented me from making my collection more interesting!)
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"Classic Head" Large Cent (U.S.) |
Though silver and gold are the precious metals to which we
typically assign greater value, this story is about the lowly copper coins. I
decided to write about finding old coins in cemeteries when a friend recently pulled an
1814 United States large cent (copper penny) out of his pocket. He
told me he found it in a small cemetery just lying in the grass a few
years back. My initial reaction upon seeing the condition of the coin was to
beg him to wrap it in something protective and not to drop it back in his
pocket with the other change. I have no firsthand knowledge of early American
coins because I could never afford to buy them; however, something in that good
condition, and that old, had to be quite valuable! I looked it up on the
Internet the next day and want to inform him that it retails for between $1,000
and $2,400, based on its officially-graded condition. The coin appeared to me
to be in extremely fine shape. (The photo above is of the actual coin he showed me.)
I assume there are other stories like this, and I would be
interested in hearing them from readers. However, I understand there might be
some reluctance to sharing, as the flags of ownership may be raised, in which I
don’t want to be involved.
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Penny lodged between the clover leaves |
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Ben Franklin's grave |
I myself have found coins on headstones – albeit worthless
ones. People sometimes place them there for good luck or as some form of
remembrance. For a long time people believed
that placing pennies (face up) over the eyes of the dead "was a means of paying
their way to cross over to the other world" (ref). Below we see people throwing pennies on Ben Franklin’s grave in (Christ's Church Burial Ground) Philadelphia – “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
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Tour guide instructing school children about tossing pennies on Ben Franklin's grave |
So if you saw all those coins in St. Lucy's eyeball bowl (at beginning of this article), would you be temped to pocket a
few dollars? Well, I often think back to finding pennies on mobster Angelo
Bruno’s headstone (link to my blog posting, "Graves of the Mob Bosses"), and how uncomfortable I would have felt were I to snitch a penny as a memento!
The fact that people place coins on tombstones today makes
it quite plausible that people have been doing so for as long as there have been
tombstones – and coins. Which of course makes it quite possible that there are
rare old coins lying around old colonial and Victorian U.S. cemeteries.
So after mentioning to a friend that I had been to the World's Fair of Money, he told me this story. Back around 2007, he was working
in a cemetery with a crew of guys righting a large obelisk that had fallen over
in a storm. A crane was to be used to lift the obelisk upright, into the air,
so it could be lowered back down onto its base. One of the guys set to the task
of clearing the channel in the marble base on which the obelisk sat. As he
brushed away leaves and sticks, he found a 1799 ("Draped Bust") United States large cent (copper
penny), like the one shown above. He showed it to his coworkers (including my friend) and stuck it in his
shirt pocket. On the way back to the truck later, he removed his shirt. That
was the last anyone saw of the coin.
After I was told that story, I looked up the value of a 1799
United States large cent. By my friend’s description, its condition was at
least as fine as the 1814 coin mentioned above. How these copper coins
remain untarnished and uncorroded after so many years in the elements is beyond me.
Ready for the value of this coin? After I checked it out on U.S. Coin Values.com, I was tempted to buy a
metal detector and head out to that cemetery myself! In worn, barely recognizable condition, it would retail for $4,000. In
the condition the coin was described to me? – about $40,000! Turns out this is the rarest
U.S. large cent ever minted. Ever.