This is a story 8 years in the making. Its a bit long, so you are welcome to just skip to the pictures at the end.
In 2010, I was acquiring large lots of silver coins and assorted other coins that came with them. I was basically bidding spot prices with some premiums for the coin groupings that warranted them. I received this coin in a large coin lot from
ebay just after Christmas when we were getting ready to go out of town. I was looking through the 2010
Red Book, and saw a value of $44,000. I had to look a few times and get my wife to verify that I was reading it right. I started to get excited and took a couple of pictures under the microscope of the date, and a few of the mintmark, but something didn't look right. The S appeared to be in the wrong location relative to the pictures on Coinfacts. The date looked a bit off as well. And I saw some indications that it may have been clamped into a vise at some point. Additionally, I weighed it and the weight was a bit light. I was pretty certain it was fake, but I had to set it aside, because we were heading out of town to go snowboarding.
A couple of nights later around midnight, we get a call from the security company saying that our basement water alarms were going off (we had them wired in to ADT because we had a few basement flooding issues). We had a neighbor check it out, and there was water pouring out of the siding of the house on the top floor. A pipe had burst in the bathroom and had flooded the bathroom, the kitchen below, and into the basement where the water alarm detected it.
Well, we had to call servepro, and the neighbor and a bunch of strangers had to go into the house and bedroom and clear out a bunch of stuff out of our closets so they could pull up the carpets, and start the flood remediation. My neighbor laughed about how he was carrying these heavy boxes and bags of coins into the spare room.
When we got home the next day, I figured there would be stuff missing, what with all the strangers walking through within easy access to them. Despite all this chaos everything seemed to be accounted for except this coin.
I scoured everything looking for this coin and never found it.
Fast forward to about 2 months ago. I was thinking about submitting some coins for grading, and was going through some of my better coins to see if anything was worth grading. I have a lot of coins, but very few valuable enough to grade. Anyway, I came across this half dollar in a coin book, and saw a
Red Book value of $66,000. And then it dawned on me, I had been looking for a
Seated dollar coin, not a half dollar. I had mis-remembered the denomination of the coin, and the only pictures I had were close-ups of the date and mint mark. It turns out that if I had consulted the
Red Book, I would have realized that there was no 1878-S
Seated dollar and likely realized my error. I know it sounds stupid, but I never looked at the book, because I wasn't looking to acquire or value something, I was just looking for the lost coin.
Anyway, here it is. 11.6 grams, 30.5 mm in diameter. A real one would be 12.5g and 30mm. I believe it is silver plated CN. It doesn't pass the ring test, and it sounds lower in conductivity on my metal detector than other like coins.
It looks like it may have been held in a clamp or vise at one time.
If you compare it to
these photos from Coinfacts, you'll see that the S should be further to the left.
Posted 11/23/2018 5:51 pm
Good backstory.
