The Redfield Hoard
Everybody loves a great story. Coin Collectors love a great story about
coins, and there are thousands of them. What is even better to a Coin
Collector is a great story, involving coins, and the story is true. This
is a real-life, silver dollar story about a man and his coins. The man's
name was LaVere Redfield, and his coins have become known as the Redfield Hoard.
There is not a great deal of information on LaVere Redfield. We can
deduce that he was born somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, and
probably only his immediate family can tell us about where he grew up.
What we do know about Mr. Redfield is that when he died in 1974, his estate was
worth about $100 million, and in the basement of his modest home, behind a false
wall was a hoard of over 411,000 silver dollars. Most of the silver
dollars were
Morgan dollars, and to a much lesser extent there were Peace
Dollars too. Many of them were still in their original Mint bags.
Just to give one a concept of 411,000 silver dollars; it is a weight of about
11-tons.
LaVere Redfield has been called thrifty, frugal, or a "hard-money" man, and
he has been described as colorful, a character, or eccentric. What we
actually know about this man is that he had a great mistrust of banks, paper
currency, and the government. After the Stock Market Crash of 1929,
Redfield arrives in Los Angeles, CA with his life's savings, and had decided it
was a good time to invest in Oil and Stocks. He bought the kind of Stocks
no one wanted, and he made a fortune. From California, Redfield moved to
Reno, Nevada, and began to invest in Real Estate. All of a sudden he was
no longer a skinflint, "hard-money" man; he was a well-informed investment
mogul. It seems he would take as much of his liquid assets as possible and
convert it into silver dollars whenever possible. That is most likely why
he moved to Reno. With all the Casinos using silver Dollars, the Banks
always had a ready supply. Also, his mistrust of the government had him
embroiled in a running feud with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which
finally earned him prison time in 1960.
Estimates tell us that at one time LaVere Redfield had amassed over 600,000
silver dollars.
Coin Collecting Site
Raymond F. Hanisco
BellaOnline's Coin Collecting Editor
remainder of story:
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art41895.asp
Posted 04/03/2006 3:18 pm
