The hot dollar
Contemporary newspapers report:
¦ In 1897, Chateau, Mont., bartender
Billy Seymour received one in change.
¦ In 1912, a Defiance, Ohio, widow
faced a comfortable old age because her late husband had bought one from a
passing tramp years before.
¦ In 1914, a laborer excavating a
site for the Yale hockey rink found one in a buried jar of coins.
Nothing more has been heard about
these fantastic finds, but in 1913 famed dealer B. Max Mehl placed a well-worn
1804 dollar in the H.O. Granberg Collection sale.
Auction commentary reported the coin
was found in Maine and was owned by a Pinkerton Detective Agency employee when
Granberg bought it in 1906.
But there was a problem with the
piece. It was unlike any 1804 dollar ever seen before. The 4 was too far to the
right.
But Mehl claimed the coin had passed
the “heat test” with flying colors, proving “beyond a doubt” that it was not
only a genuine 1804 dollar but that it was a genuine 1804 dollar struck in
1804.
Granberg, he said, had prevailed
upon the Mint to test the coin. A 1906 report by Pinkerton operative Charles F.
Dahlen was included in the auction description, where he is quoted as saying
the Mint’s curator “took me to the Chief Engraver, who gave the dollar what he
termed ‘a severe heat test,’ by heating the ‘4’ and endeavored to pick and
knock it off, BUT IT REMAINED FAST.”
Heat test or no, critics abounded,
and Mehl withdrew the coin from the sale.
That coin, actually an altered 1800
dollar, remained in the Granberg family for decades and was exhibited at the
2011 ANA Word’s Fair of Money.
Granberg also owned a genuine 1804
dollar, the Idler specimen, which was donated to the ANA museum in 1991 by
Aubrey and Adeline Bebee.
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Rare coins by the bagful