A 5-cent coin with a storied past is headed to auction and
bidding is expected to top $2 million a century after it was mysteriously
minted.
The 1913 Liberty Head nickel is one of only five known to exist,
but it's the coin's back story that adds to its cachet: It was surreptitiously
and illegally cast, discovered in a car wreck that killed its owner, declared a
fake, forgotten in a closet for decades and then found to be the real deal.
It is expected to fetch $2.5 million or more when it goes on the
auction block April 25 in suburban Chicago.
The sellers who will split the money equally are four Virginia
siblings who never let the coin slip from their hands, even when it was deemed
a fake.
The nickel made its debut in a most unusual way. It was struck
at the Philadelphia mint in late 1912, the final year of its issue, but with
the year 1913 cast on its face — the same year the beloved Buffalo Head nickel
was introduced.
Mudd said a mint worker named Samuel W. Brown is suspected of
producing the coin and altering the die to add the bogus date.
The coins' existence wasn't known until Brown offered them for
sale at the American Numismatic Association Convention in Chicago in 1920,
beyond the statute of limitations. The five remained together under various
owners until the set was broken up in 1942.
A North Carolina collector, George O. Walton, purchased one of
the coins in the mid-1940s for a reported $3,750. The coin was with him when he
was killed in a car crash on March 9, 1962, and it was found among hundreds of
coins scattered at the crash site.
One of Walton's heirs, his sister, Melva Givens of Salem, Va.,
was given the 1913 Liberty nickel after experts declared the coin a fake
because of suspicions the date had been altered. The flaw probably happened
because of Brown's imprecise work casting the planchet — the copper and nickel
blank disc used to create the coin.
Melva Givens put the coin in an envelope and stuck it in a
closet, where it stayed for the next 30 years until her death in 1992.
The coin caught the curiosity of Cheryl Myers' brother, Ryan
Givens, the executor of his mother's estate. "He'd take it out and look at
it for long periods of time," she said.
Givens said a family attorney had heard of the famous 1913
Liberty nickels and asked if he could see the Walton coin. "He looked at
it and he told me he'd give me $5,000 for it right there," he said, declining
an offer he could not accept without his siblings' approval.
Finally, they brought the coin to the 2003 American Numismatic
Association World's Fair of Money in Baltimore, where the four surviving 1913
Liberty nickels were being exhibited. A team of rare coin experts concluded it
was the long-missing fifth coin. Each shared a small imperfection under the
date.
