Regular readers may recall a summer memory I wrote about involving a yellow, plastic pirate’s treasure chest. It was a beach toy I had as a small child.
Each summer, our family headed to an idyllic beach in Michigan. Prior to the trip, I had saved up almost two-dollars. At that time, for a young kid, that was a lot. Seriously. I had it in a dollar bill and various silver coins. Toward the end of our vacation, I imagined how cool it would be to bury real treasure and then dig it up. I couldn’t resist....
I found a place in the dunes and buried my stash in the yellow chest. I marked the spot with a stick. As happens on sandy ridges, wind and weather quickly changed things. When I went to retrieve my cache, for the life of me, I couldn’t find it. I searched for what seemed forever. Best as I can tell, even today, somewhere in the dunes, my plastic store of treasure waits to be found.
A young man named James Howells has a screamingly vivid idea as to how I felt. James is far more technologically savvy than I. Back around 2009, young James was a computer engineer in Wales who saw potential in a little something called Bitcoin. Then 8,000 bitcoins cost just $8.00.
Because Bitcoins are intangible, Howells bought and put his 8,000 Bitcoin holdings on the hard drive of his computer and forgot about them. For the paltry sum they were worth, why not? Well, just two later, in 2013, the value of just one Bitcoin has climbed to over $750. Howells was instantly a multi-millionaire with over $3.7 million worth of Bitcoin! Today, just one Bitcoin is valued at $111,000.
2013 marked Howell’s version of my yellow plastic treasure chest. The hard drive on which his Bitcoins were store was accidentally thrown away by his partner into a landfill. With the value of his Bitcoins now at almost $900 million, Howell’s has been on a do-or-die mission to retrieve the hard drive from the landfill. He has begged, sued and even offered over half a billion dollars to the Wales city council. No soap. Each time he has petitioned them, they have refused for logistical, ecological and/or other reasons. No digging.
I can’t help but think of how people kept, stored and stashed their money in centuries past. Those who recall the movie It’s A Wonderful Life know, as recently as a century ago, banks could and did fail. Fortunes were lost. The Great Depression was the epicenter of much of that. If your bank failed, you could lose all the money in it. Similarly, in colonial days, the Old West or the Bonnie and Clyde era of banks, when they were robbed, customers lost all their money.
That was the reason for the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 1933. It assured bank depositors their savings were safe should a bank fail, was robbed or closed.
Even after that addition of insurance, many in rural areas didn’t trust others with their money. Many a family’s savings were squirreled away in mason jars buried around their homes or farms. To this day, people with metal detectors know that areas around old homes are ripe for searching for such buried treasure.
Most often, the family riches – sometimes in the form of paper money but most often in gold and silver coins – were buried in jars near the corner of a stone wall, beside a large tree, or a measured distance from an obvious landmark. Naturally, trees grow, get old and sometimes fall. Ergo, searching anywhere near a large old stump can be fertile hunting grounds. Outhouses used to be standard at many homes and farms. They served well as markers for burying riches.
One of the more intriguing places buried jars of gold and silver coins have been found is in cemeteries. Once a loved one has been buried, chances are slim anyone will be digging around the gravesite. Particularly at rural and even colonial cemeteries, treasure hunters have uncovered valuable caches of vintage coins.
Case in point, at one Midwest cemetery, a searcher kept getting a pronounced “beep” in front of a large marker. Finally, the man dug down a few inches. That’s where he pulled up a jar filled with gleaming silver dollars from the 1800s worth many thousands.
No doubt, James Howells would wish for that same luck. Once, so too would a young boy seeking a yellow plastic pirate chest.
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