Whats Your Most Meaningful Coin(S) And Why?

great stories!

Mine is an 1854-O Half Dime. It's in less than about good condition, literally. It also has a hole in it so I'm sure it was around someones necks for years. I found in the bottom of a half off bin at a coin shop and I felt the need to rescue it. It's almost so ugly that it's not ugly at all, and I can't help but be drawn to it every time I look at it.

My favorite in my collection is a 1829 Capped Bust Half in VF condition. I purchased the coin from a friend of mine for $300. That is about the actual dealer value for the coin, but since it was helping a friend, I was glad to pay that. Plue this coin has a fantastic story behind it.

The coin was discovered as part of a hoard of coins found in a trash dumpster in Mt.Sterling KY in 1925. My friends grandfather was 18 years old and his new wife was pregnant. The trash collecting job didn't pay much, but it was all the work he could find. Two people worked a trash route. One person would drive, and the other would throw the trash in the back of the truck. The two of them stopped at a large dumpster and next to it was a rather large heavy sack. One man could not lift it, so the two of them attempted to lift it together. Curiosity got the best of them and they opened the sack to look inside. To their surprise, the sack was full of coins. Not cents either, but large coins. It was a mix of everything from gold double eagles to silver Half Dimes and more. The coins had a face value of over $25,000. Once the city found out about their discovery they took the coins from them and waited for someone to claim them. They even placed adds in the local paper about a stash of lost coins.

The city then decided the coin belonged to the city and not the men that found them. They took the city to court and won possession of the coins back from the city. They divided the coins 50/50 and my friends father used the money to build a house for his new family. He kept one coin from the stash. The 1829 Half that I now own. I have the coin locked away with a manuscript of its origin for my son to inherit one day. Not that the story makes it anymore valuable, but its a story good enough that I feel it needs to be told.

I have collected things since I was young. I collected comics, bottle caps, football and baseball cards, stamps, and a host of other things. No one in my family is really a collector, but me. I remember that my aunt had this little box of older coins, and I would sneak into her room to look at them. She is since passed away.

I would enjoy taking my allowance as a boy, and I started collecting Lincoln cents and Buffalo nickels. I got Whitman albums and worked on it, getting most of the less expensive dates. I would go through change in mom's purse and any place I could. I got an entire 20 century Type set for fun.

I put my collection down for some time during college, but then I picked it back up when I moved to the Philly area.

Not long after that, I spent 8 years in Germany, and began to collect European coins. I was working in Germany in 2002, when the Euro took over. I can still remember, getting new euros out of the bank ATM on Jan. 1, 2002. Since then, I collect euros as well. They are fun because they all have a common side, but each of the 12(now 15) countries has a different national side, too. 2 euro Commems are particularly fun to collect! This year, all of the members are minting a 10 Years of Euro cash Commem.

For the last 5 years, I have been back in the US, and I am getting my 10 year old daughter interested. She got a coin book, which I helped her fill. Also, my lovely wife buys coins for me for some occasions, such a Valentine's.

My favorite coin is a Jefferson medal that my daughter got me as a gift at Montecello.

There is something special about looking for the missing coins, and working to fill a set!

Pretty amazing stories.

I have an 1856 S $2.50 gold coin that I got from my mother, who got it from her mother. It is fairly worn on one side, so it is only VF, but still, my grandmother got it from circulation. So I will never cash that one in, no matter how high gold goes, even though it is just worth bullion value.

The other is a set of Lincoln cents (in two blue Whitman folders), that I got from my best friend as a get well gift, after having my appendix removed at 11 years old. The folders were about half full, and that is what got me started in coin collecting. I don't have the friend, but I still have the coins. We parted ways, a very long time ago. Actually, it was only about 3 years later, after receiving the coins. Kind of sad on why he did that too.

I have coins my great grandmother sewed into my grampa's WW1 uniform shirt on his way to France. I have coins from my Dad's collection, my father-in-law's service in Europe during WW2...
But my most meaningful coin was a penny (I know, I'm supposed to call it a cent..). I was on a long backpacking trip, from Kent CT to Katahdin in Maine on the Appalachian Trail, and just north of the Maine/NH border the hike began to really suck. My two buddies got poison ivy wicked bad in Massachusetts and had to go home. It had rained almost every day for the last two weeks. I missed a rendezvous with my girlfriend on Mt Washington by 30 minutes. My knee brace was broken. My stove broke. I chipped a tooth. A mouse had gotten into my food bag. And did I tell you about the rain? Well, just after I was stung by a hornet (twice), I was hiking with my head down feeling sorry for myself and planning to "bail" - to get off the trail. And there it was. A shiny penny, heads up, on a rock in the middle of the trail. A lucky penny. And I thought about how lucky I was. To have buddies. To have a girlfriend. To have the time to be outdoors. To have met two girls hiking in the other direction who had two stoves - and loaned me one. I picked up the penny, picked up my feet, and enjoyed every mile all the way to the top of Katahdin - where I left the penny, heads up, for next guy who needed it.

Franklin halves for sure!
As a child, I used to sift through my dad's car compartment/glove box for coins, back then I was interested in the Wheat cent coins because I thought they were rare with such an old design. Countless times I would find Franklin halves and was curious as to why they sounded so different when dropped, my dad and I had no idea they're silver, so it just stayed there and got spent!
Last year, I cracked open a total of 10 rolls from a local bank and found 10 franklins, and I'm still holding on to those babies :D
Thanks for letting me share!