Old Wheat Pennies - Keep Or Sell?

I just spend common wheats. Tired of lugging bags of them around for years.



to the CCF!

to the CCF!

You should check for key dates and sell those, but average circulated Lincoln Wheat Cents (LWCs) are only worth a few cents and it's hard to sell individual examples. It easier to sell rolls or 'by the pound' collections of common date LWCs.

It's really up to you. If you have space to store the coins and want to make a couple of cents per coin, bag them up and wait until can sell in bulk.

You may want to check with your Local Coin Shop to see what they offer.

I keep ALL wheaties I find. Once it finds its way into my hands, it has a home with me forever.

IMO common date circulated wheat cents will never have any true numismatic premium - and take a lot of space to store. In general I get rid of them.

My local coin store used to sell bulk common date wheat cents at 3 cents each - and he would buy at 2 cents each when he was running low.

Back when I was actively roll searching I'd bring him mine to serve as a small down payment on whatever I bought from his shop.

Now that he is closed down I just set them aside for the next opportunity to sell them.

my lcs buys them for 3.5 cents

I save mine as well

I save all of them. My kids know I love coins. They will find them with my other coins and say why the heck was Dad saving pennies. I really think they will be worth their weight in the future.

Well, for one thing, I love the look of the reverse. The curved wheat stalks represent nature, as opposed to the man-made straight lines and right angles of the memorial reverse. (I'm not going to even mention the horrid shield reverse. Oops--too late, I just did.)

The wheaties also were all minted before I was born (1959). So they are all automatically attached to a history I never knew in real life.

Continuing the historical angle, the farther we go back, the more the world changes. Just imagine someone holding a brand-new 1937 wheatie. In that moment, the name Hitler was still one that you might hear just occasionally on the radio or see on the newsreels at the local movie theater, but nothing too sinister yet. In 1937, World War One was known as "the world war" or "the great war" ("great" in the sense that it was something large, influential and noteworthy).

Going back even further, someone holding a new 1913 wheatie would know nothing of what are called "world wars." Someone holding a new 1909 wheatie might have actually been around in Lincoln's time, as our great president had died only 44 years previous. And in 1909, the following items had yet to be invented: the crossword puzzle (1913), the bra (1913), the Band-Aid (1920), the traffic signal (1923), bubble gum (1928), the car radio (1929), Scotch tape (1930), commercial air travel (1933), jet engines (1937), the ballpoint pen (1938) and the helicopter (1939), not to mention penicillin and antibiotics. Imagine not only not having these items in your life but not even having any conception of them.

Obviously there are other historical markers; these are the examples that first come to my mind. So like all old coins, owning a wheatie is like owning a piece of personal history. They were around in my parents' childhoods. They've all been around for at least 65 years--older than I am. And if they could talk, each cent could relate innumerable stories of the hands they've been in, the places they've been and the history they have witnessed.