While sitting on a bench in a park near our neighborhood, I spotted what looked like a penny in the dirt. I thought little of it but finally opted to pick it up. It turned out to be a dirt encrusted dime. When I was a child, finding a dime would have been epic. It would have paid for several candy bars or multiple packs of baseball cards. It also would have been made of silver....
It helps one imagine how seemingly paltry coins were once revered. That’s what is intriguing about New England. The amount of history waiting to be found at anyone’s feet is palpable.
Case in point, a little over 30 years ago, a woman in East Hampton, New York – some 200 miles south of Boston – decided to try her hand with a metal detector. She took it to search an old potato field. After a while, she got a signal. She dug down into the frozen soil and out popped a silver coin. Her trowel even made a small gash on the old coin. Truthfully, the word “old” is a misnomer.
The coin she found was overtly plain with no date. On one side were the letters “NE.” On the other, the Roman numeral “VI.” She hoped it was significant. That’s putting it mildly. Her coin was a super rare New England sixpence made over 300 years earlier around 1652 in Boston.
That piece, along with silver three-pence and one shilling silver coins was made from silver brought to the new world from the West Indies and struck in Boston. It would be the first of many rarities hand made in Massachusetts.
Once the woman realized what she had, in 1992, she put it up for auction. Her small coin brought a hefty $35,000. Of course, it’s said rarities only increase in value over time. That can be true. But, with other “investments” such as Beanie Babies; Hummel Figurines and other mass-produced items, not so much. However, truly rare coins have consistently risen in value.
That randomly found New England sixpence is known to be one of the first coins made in America. Struck a mere 30 years after the first Thanksgiving, a bit more time helped it rise far higher than its face value. In 2012, rose even more, over 1,200 percent to a staggering $430,000 at auction.
Though the population and geography of the known American world was quantifiably smaller in the 1600s and 1700s, many Massachusetts coins traveled far from home. Another find came 250 miles north near the then-tiny community of Castine, Maine at the mouth of the Bagaduce River.
In the late-1600s, Castine was a contested region of land claimed by the Wabanaki and Penobscot tribes and the English and the French. During the back-and-forth wrest for control among those groups, a trading post was established for trade with the Wabanaki on the river, some six miles from the original fort in Castine. Even in that remote northern region, substantial trade took place.
Some 150 years later, in 1840, a family named Grindle worked a farm near where that trading post once stood. That year, the Grindles uncovered a cache of hundreds of coins buried on the farm. They are strongly believed to have come from the long-gone trading post.
Among these were examples of Massachusetts Pine Tree, Oak Tree and Willow Tree coins – so named because of the rustic image of those trees on them. Struck with the date “1652” on them, those coins were actually made in Boston in the later-1600s. Today, it’s not uncommon for those and other coinage from the “New World” to bring between $1,000 and $600,000 apiece. (One of the most valuable is a tiny Threepence Willow Tree coin about the size of a modern dime.)
The simple truth is that people in the 1600s and 1700s carried their coins in small leather pouches or torn pockets and accidentally lost them as easily as we do. Maybe easier. And, remember, small, buried metal items almost always slowly make their way nearer to or atop the surface.
Whether in a potato field, near a river or a modern park bench, many errantly dropped, centuries-old items wait to be found. For those traveling to or around New England it could make for an accidentally exciting summer.
For more collecting information and advice, log on to: http://prexford.com/.