Pedigrees & Hoards: The Binion Hoard

Interesting story behind that hoard.

Great article, thanks for the post on it!

I've got a couple Binion Hoard silver dollars in NGC slabs with the Binion pedigree on them. There was an article written up in the E-Sylum newsletter this month on Binion, his $10,000 note display of $1,000,000 was housed in a large glass horseshoe at his casino, I have a photo of me next to it somewhere at my Mom's in the family scrapbooks. The widow of Binion sold off the notes not long ago, $72K per $10K note, as I recall from the article there are less than 340 $10K notes left in circulation that have not been picked up by the Federal Reserve as of 2000. Quite the profit on them today.

Binion's new $1,000,000 display is pretty dumb IMO, a bunch of notes of various denominations filling a plexiglass pyramid, they offer free photos of it along with 2 showgirls (as long as you are over 18) during the day, nowhere near as classy as the old display.

Here is the article: http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v12n48a17.html Keep going through the next few issues to see more shorts on it as well as my post on the new display.

Somewhere in one of the books I have there are photos of the inside of one of Binion's vaults. It's pretty impressive as I recall, silver dollar bags stacked nilly willy to the ceiling, it was a black and white photo and pretty grainy as it was shot inside and probably a pretty dark cellar type bunker from what I gather. It looked to be at least 20-30 feet long and at least 12-15 feet wide, I'd guess there were around 100-200 bags of silver dollars stacked around (1000 coins per bag) so at around a quarter million dollars in that vault alone!

Silver dollars were no problem to get up until the great silver recall in the 1960's, Dave Bowers mentions in several of his books that he could have ordered and received 500,000 or a million for face value if he had the means to pay for them, but almost nobody collected them, unlike today.

The book on Leon Henderson's life and the story of building up Silvertowne is a really good read, as he was one of the few individuals that regularly handled thousands of bags of silver dollars. So many in fact he had to build a coal ramp type chute to go down to his basement, just to save on the labor of carrying them down a flight of stairs. At one time he had so many silver dollars in his home the foundation of the house was at risk of collapsing (seriously).

There were some great hoards of silver dollars that came to light; Binion, LaVere Redfield, The Continental Bank Hoard, The Wells Fargo hoard, but all of them paled in size to the what the U.S. Treasury was sitting on at the time, the amount stunned even the most prolific silver dollar dealers of that era.

The U.S. Government figured that around 50 million dollars were in regular circulation use, while they had minted and were storing almost 600 million dollars since 1904. The Pittman act of 1918 (World War I) melted 270,000,000 dollars, they melted another 350,000,000 to shore up India's failing currency, then another 50,000,000 to provide bullion for smaller coinage during World War II. In 1921 the U.S. Government once again began minting silver dollars (mainly to provide a backing for silver certificates being produced). By 1928 the mintage of new dollars had completely erased the damage of the Pittman Act's loss of 270,000,000 dollars. Though not as many dollars were being stored as they had in 1904 the number was still in the hundreds of millions of them, available to anyone that asked for payment at banks or the Treasury. By the time the great sell off ended in 1964 less than 3 million bags remained, mostly Carson City issues, which as we know were sold via public auction through the GSA in the early 1970's, then finally via direct marketing (again GSA run) in the early 1980's.

The real tragedy, is there was no records kept of what years and mint marks were melted - so no true count remains of the number of surviving dollars.

Back to Binon - his hoard was only 100,000 or so in silver dollars, his real treasure was the 6 tons of bullion he had! LaVere Redfield hoard was around 400,000 dollars, the Continental Bank Hoard had 1,500,000 http://www.nationalsilverdollarroun....org/?p=1330 so you see as much as the Binion and Redfield hoards are talked about they were actually pretty small in the annals of silver dollar hoards. But still very interesting stories worth reading and studying. Thankfully due to their hoarding, us numismatists have a lot of nice silver dollars that were saved from the melting posts.

I was a coin dealer around the time of the Continental bank Hoard (it was kept a huge secret surprisingly so) I had no idea about it, but I do remember some of the dealers I worked with suddenly had boxes upon boxes (double row) of nice silver dollars (common dates for the most part) for sale, wholesale, three price ranges MS60/MS63/MS65 can't remember how much but nothing was much over $40 or $50 then your pick, prices went down depending on how many dollars you bought. Later after the Continental Hoard had been disbursed, Leon Hendrickson acquired another privately held hoard of 250,000 dollars and wholesaled them out to the coin collecting community. He says some of the bigger banks may still hold 10-20 bags each (this was in the late 1980's) but most have probably been sold off by now.

Which hoard had the dollars that were damaged by the exploding canned food?

That was the Redfield hoard. Exploding canned peaches.