Finally, A Tale Of 97,000

The scanner and my new computer with windows Vista are finally talking with each other.

I have wanted to tell this tale for quite awhile but wanted pics included. There will be other submissions to this but it starts here.

Over a year ago, now, I finally had the opportunity I had been trying to achieve for a long time. Through a friend I had learned that his father owned buckets of cents that he had collected over the years. He turned 94 this year and with failing health and no child that cared to deal with a mountain of cents, he asked his son to see if I was still interested. It took me about 7 seconds to get to his house and agreed to pay him 10% over what we would estimate the total to be. I asked why we just don't count them and was told "you will see". To explain where these came from, he had owned a general store of sorts for almost 40 years and had been throwing all the cents that came in, into buckets. He close the store in 1982 and the youngest coin in the collection was of that date. To continue, I followed him out to the coins. He lives on the mainland side of the bay between the Maryland coast and a barrier island. In front of the dock behind the house was a small wooden equipment shed with a burlap cloth for a door. Now this was about 10 feet from the bay proper and I am sure you are seeing the problem. There were 11 five gallon pail from a third to two thirds full of cents. The bucket closest to the door also had about an inch of water in it. Here is an example of what they looked like.

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A lot were much worse. It took a long time, but I gleaned out the very worst and then started sorting. This is where I probably made my mistake. I just simply got tired of the overall quality and to an extent gave up. While the buckets toward the rear of the shed were not bad, so many had problems I decided to pull out the wheats, obvious dates that should be looked at like 1955, 1972 etc and turned the rest in to the bank. Yes they were copper and I should have keep them if only for that. However, and more importantly, I have come to believe that this was in fact an unsearched horde. The census alone would have been fascinating. I am afraid to think about what else was there, considering what I have found. Anyway, I believe this to be my mistake of the century in coin collecting.

I will be posting pics and tales of the finds shortly, now that I can get pics up on the forum.

Jim