https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/most-insane-thing-ever-man-finds-huge-hoard-civil-war-gold-kentucky-farm

Gold coins from 1850-1863 including 18 examples of a very rare coin.

Dedicated page for the coming auction

https://www.govmint.com/great-kentucky-hoard

Looks like they only have the $20 gold libertys on sale

Pretty amazing. I metal detect and know quite a few others who do and some of them spend a lot of time in the field. Not a single gold coin among all of us. Gold rings, gold jewelry yeah, but not one gold coin. What a find.

wouldn't it have been smarter to just pack up all those coins and drive across the border to canada and sell them one by one

so you don't have to pay 60% taxes and have people trying to invade your property?

LMCane said:

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wouldn't it have been smarter to just pack up all those coins and drive across the border to canada and sell them one by one

so you don't have to pay 60% taxes and have people trying to invade your property?

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assuming you make it past customs on both sides of the border, most likely you risk it all getting seized at the border. And if you get them across, you don't think Canada isn't going to take taxes out of the sales

Madman said:

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I just wonder who did it and why they never got to come back for the loot.

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This. I'm intensely curious on the back story too.

Aggie Infantry said:

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The original owner of the gold was probably overcome by lead.

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yeah we will never get any real info.

And the fact that there are so many of 1 type of rare coin makes me think this isn't a fraud either. That is unless someone figured out how to make great counterfeits and the rest of the horde is just to cover for this fact.

Actually that might be an angle to snoop into if you were a buyer.

How hard is it to fake gold coins?

P.H. Dexippus said:

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Madman said:

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I just wonder who did it and why they never got to come back for the loot.

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There was already a documentary on this.

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plot twist.

It was a Norwegian immigrant who still prayed to the old gods. This horde would be his in the afterlife along with all the men he killed in the war as his slaves.

Now the owners of each gold coin will be murdered by a ghost viking collecting his revenge.

edit

A ghost viking with an axe but dressed in civil war garb.

part 2

Thanks for posting those videos. They were fascinating. I'm surprised that the horde wasn't worth considerably more than $3 million.

A lot of things about the value then and now seem surprising. The comment that the horde was = to the wages of nine soldiers for a year also surprised me.

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The comment that the horde was = to the wages of nine soldiers for a year also surprised me.

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Yeah, me too. I would have thought that that number of coins would have been a heck of a lot more than that.

But perhaps not. 800 coins/9 = approx. 89 coins per soldier. The majority may have been smaller coins such as 1/10 oz with a "face value" of $5 which would have been their actual value in 1863-4. 89 coins would have had a minimum value of $445 (a greater value if some of the coins were larger denominations), which isn't all that great as an annual wage.

I don't think this is worth its own thread so i will ask it here.

I just assume that Union and Confederate soldiers were paid like today and also given food and some amount of material in addition to a weapon and ammunition. Or would that be incorrect? Or in other words, what did a soldier receive in addition to pay?

Because if they also had to buy their own food and other items maybe the amount of money is less surprising.

one safe place said:

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Pretty amazing. I metal detect and know quite a few others who do and some of them spend a lot of time in the field. Not a single gold coin among all of us. Gold rings, gold jewelry yeah, but not one gold coin. What a find.

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My Dad found a Spanish doubloon (silver) on Padre Island about 75 yrs ago, but even then he knew that gold was so heavy that it had already sifted through the sand to depths beyond a metal detector.

Jabin said:

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Quote:

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The comment that the horde was = to the wages of nine soldiers for a year also surprised me.

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Yeah, me too. I would have thought that that number of coins would have been a heck of a lot more than that.

But perhaps not. 800 coins/9 = approx. 89 coins per soldier. The majority may have been smaller coins such as 1/10 oz with a "face value" of $5 which would have been their actual value in 1863-4. 89 coins would have had a minimum value of $445 (a greater value if some of the coins were larger denominations), which isn't all that great as an annual wage.

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He said in the video that the face value of the coins was right around $1,200 so that would mean a yearly salary of around $133.00. One dollar gold coins made up like 95% of the hoard.

I found some of my father's documents when he got out of the Marines in 1945. He had not been paid for around six months as I recall. Seems to me as if the last amount he was paid was $176 or $276 for those six months. I always thought that wasn't much for getting your ass shot at. So, double those amounts to reflect an annual salary and there wasn't much of an increase between 1863 (assumed date they were buried since that was the most recent date on the coins) and 1945, or 82 years in time!

Wow, what an exciting find!

Did it was up from the Spanish Sea (Gulf)? Or was it dropped by one of the many Spanish or French castaways who wrecked on the Texas coast and walked or tried to walk to Mexico along the coast? It would be cool to know the story.

He had a map of several beach locations where there had been previous finds - wrecks and water currents were the causes of these "hot" locations.

Rongagin71 said:

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He had a map of several beach locations where there had been previous finds - wrecks and water currents were the causes of these "hot" locations.

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Isn't metal detecting on TX beaches illegal?

I had a HS buddy who had a place in Port Mansfield. We went down there for a couple of weeks one summer.

We ate dinner several nights w/ one of their good friends and neighbor who lived there full time. He showed us Spanish real coins he had found detecting on the beach near the Mansfield Cut. He believed a wreck was not far off shore. Evidently, he was known to authorities for metal detecting on the beach.

He wanted to give me a detector and have me search the beach. He said if anyone said anything to act dumb and I would get off with a warning. I was fifteen at the time and I didn't take him up on it.

Gator92 said:

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Rongagin71 said:

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He had a map of several beach locations where there had been previous finds - wrecks and water currents were the causes of these "hot" locations.

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Isn't metal detecting on TX beaches illegal?

I had a HS buddy who had a place in Port Mansfield. We went down there for a couple of weeks one summer.

We ate dinner several nights w/ one of their good friends and neighbor who lived there full time. He showed us Spanish real coins he had found detecting on the beach near the Mansfield Cut. He believed a wreck was not far off shore. Evidently, he was known to authorities for metal detecting on the beach.

He wanted to give me a detector and have me search the beach. He said if anyone said anything to act dumb and I would get off with a warning. I was fifteen at the time and I didn't take him up on it.

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It is legal to metal detect on Texas beaches. I have read that you are supposed to get a permit from the General Land Office. I do not know if that is correct or not. But nobody I know has ever gotten a permit nor had any issues.

However, the rules are that you cannot remove any "artifacts" but are supposed to take a picture of it, get the GPS coordinates, leave it there, and notify the Texas Historical Commission, lol. Nobody is going to abide by that. If someone found several pieces of silver or a gold coin or two, probably best not to post it on Facebook though.

The artifact rule uses the word "collecting" so I assume it would apply to what is found with or without a metal detector. Again, nobody is going to leave it where they found it though.