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So my question is were have all these MS 60 - MS64 come from in troves of hundreds ? Some sellers have numerous amounts , but in the 1800's those coins were used as daily commodity . so someone is telling me thousands of the graded coins in MS range mentioned from hording or vault boxes of buried treasure?
Even back in the 1800s, coin collectors existed. There weren't many of them, but they were there, and they kept many common ordinary coins in pristine condition, using whatever preservation techniques were available at the time. Many early bronze and copper coins were lacquered, for example; as much as modern collectors would denounce the use of lacquer, the lacquer "worked" in keeping the coins nice and red. Copper won't stay "red" if exposed to the open air for 200 years (especially the sulfur-polluted air of your typical 19th century city), so if you see a bright red 200 year old coin, you've probably got an old coin collector with some lacquer to thank for it. Mason jars have been around since the 1800s and would also have worked pretty well at keeping coins from oxidation, though not everyone thought to use them for coins.
"Buried treasure" is a very poor way of preserving coins in pristine condition. As the people who dug up
that car in the time capsule learned, any container buried underground (and not out in some rainless desert) is bound to eventually let in ground water, and ground water is the death of nice clean metallic objects like coins.
Quote:The mint discovered a room in the Carson City mint with multiple bags of circulated Silver
Morgan dollars & began an auction as to keep these coins values from diminishing , but there was too many bidders & those coins weren't all sold - mint did what with these coins ?
If you Google "GSA Morgan", you will find all you need to know about the story of that particular hoard of coins. The coins were originally stored at the Carson City mint but had been shipped to Washington back in 1899 (apparently it took a train of 10 boxcars to ship them), where they sat in Treasury Building vaults as backing for silver certificates. That stockpile of silver dollars was originally much larger but it was diminished as people rushed to redeem their silver certificates in the early 1960s; the "3 million" figure was all the Treasury had left in the vault once silver certificate redemption in coin ceased in 1964. And yes, the GSA sold every single one of the coins in the hoard, eventually. The initial sales in 1973-74 weren't as popular as the GSA had hoped but they still sold 2 out of the 3 million coins in stock. The remaining 1 million coins languished in their vaults for a couple more years but were all sold off during the Hunt Brothers silver spike of 1979.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted Yesterday 4:18 pm
