Valuable dollar bill

Potential value discussed in the currency subreddit thread.  I've never paid much attention to the serial numbers of bills that pass through my hands.  Perhaps I should start.

Addendum:  Suggestions from an anonymous reader -

"Don't forget about the duplicate printing of the 2013 B $1 star note. There are millions of them out there, it's just a matter of finding them. Depending on the condition of the bill, the serial number sequence (collectors will pay more for unique sequences as mentioned in the subreddit or ones like 10101010 or 12345678), and who may have the other matching bill, they can be valued at $20,000 to $150,000. New site: https://project2013b2.com/ Older separate site: https://www.2013b.com/ . Also, any bill that has a star at the end of the serial number is a reprint and can be worth more than the face value."

BTW, I've been rather delinquent in adding posts for the past couple weeks because of holiday/family/health/weather factors.  Expect this to continue for a couple more weeks.

A 2020 quarter worth $15-20

Because of the "W" (West Point) mint mark.   Some relevant discussion in the coins subreddit.

Awesome treasure found in Kentucky

A Kentucky man got the surprise of his life while digging in his field earlier this year: a cache of over 700 coins from the American Civil War era.

The "Great Kentucky Hoard" includes hundreds of U.S. gold pieces dating to between 1840 and 1863, in addition to a handful of silver coins...

According to the Numismatic Guaranty Co. (NGC), which certified the coins' authenticity, and GovMint, where the coins were sold, 95% of the hoard is composed of gold dollars, along with 20 $10 Liberty coins and eight $20 Liberty coins. The rarest is the 1863-P $20 1-ounce gold Liberty coin. Just one of these coins can go for six figures at auction, and the Great Kentucky Hoard boasts 18 of them...

Ryan McNutt, a conflict archaeologist at Georgia Southern University who has heard about but not seen the hoard, told Live Science in an email that "given the time period and the location in Kentucky, which was neutral at the time, it is entirely possible this was buried in advance of Confederate John Hunt Morgan's June to July 1863 raid." 

Many wealthy Kentuckians are rumored to have buried huge sums of money to prevent it from being stolen by the Confederacy. James Langstaff left a letter saying he had buried $20,000 in coins on his property in Paducah, William Pettit buried $80,000 worth of gold coins near Lexington, and Confederate soldiers quarantined for measles reportedly stole payroll and hid it in a cave in Cumberland Gap. None of these caches has ever been recovered...

There is an "unboxing" video here, reportedly filmed as the trove was being unearthed.  I love treasure stories, but if this hoard was found on the farm in Kentucky where I lived in the 1970s, I'm going to be distraught.

Genuine Picasso plates found in thrift store

Cavaliere moved to New York City from Italy when she was just eight years old, and after getting married in 2014, she started to get into thrifting, mostly to furnish her apartment.

Picking up tableware, furnishings and trinkets, the 36-year-old hit the jackpot one day when she stumbled on a set of $6 plates... 

Picasso designed 633 different ceramic editions between 1947 and 1971—from simple utilitarian objects like plates and bowls to complex pitchers and vases...

The thrifter watched as the auctions climbed, and her ceramic discovery started selling for $12,000, $13,000, and even $16,000 [each]...

This isn't her only lucrative find, either. A while after the plates, she stumbled on an Alexander McQueen jumpsuit from his second ever collection. Picking it up for $20, it was sold for an amazing $8,500.

I donate to Goodwill, and enjoy shopping there occasionally.

The upside of hurricanes

This is the ultimate dream discovery for every old man with a metal detector.  The authorities of course respond by asking the public to stay away because it could be dangerous (i.e. "please leave the gold doubloons for us").

Sharks' teeth found on a river bottom

"These are all fossilized and the river has eroded down to the layer where the teeth are. I’ve got megalodons, great whites, makos, and angustidens here. Pretty much all of the east coast states used to be under water when all the polar ice was melted. We had a lot of whales and because of that a lot of large predators. For as many teeth as I find there had to have been a lot of sharks here for a very long time. This was just two scuba tanks worth of diving. I actually found a lot more than this but most were in pretty bad shape."

Modern treasure

"An unopened copy of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda that was made in 1987 has sold at auction for $870,000.

Heritage Auctions in Dallas said the video game sold Friday.  The auction house said it was a rare version that was created during a limited production run that took place during a few months in late 1987."

Treasure chest

It began with an unmarked, unremarkable box tucked in a corner of a garage in California. Inside, under miscellaneous letters and old high school yearbooks, was a smaller shoe box. Inside that, under old coins and a numismatist pamphlet, lay the 240-year-old diary of sailor John Claypoole, a Revolutionary War prisoner of war and later the third husband of the flagmaker known as Betsy Ross.

“It was wrapped in a piece of paper that said, ‘John Claypoole diary to be handled with great care,’ which was sort of funny we found it in a paper shoe box in a box in this garage,” recalled Aileen Edge, who with her husband uncovered the priceless item in her mother’s Marin County home in June 2020...

Growing up in Marin County, Calif., Aileen Edge always knew she was a direct descendant of John Claypoole and Betsy Ross, who was formally known as Elizabeth Griscom Ross Ashburn Claypoole when she died in 1836 at age 84.  Edge’s mother, Claire Canby Keleher, was the famous flagmaker’s great-great-great-granddaughter and fiercely proud of her family’s role in the nation’s birth.

The rest of the story is at The Washington Post.

Thrift store treasure

"A painting by David Bowie purchased last summer at a donation centre in rural Ontario for $5 is expected to fetch upward of $12,000 at auction this coming week. The semi-abstract portrait by the Changes singer is a small acrylic and computer collage on canvas, dated 1997, with Bowie’s signature on the reverse.

The painting is titled DHead XLVI. It was found in a Goodwill shop in South River, Ont., a village some three hours north of Toronto. The identity of the portrait subject is unknown, and the name of the painting’s owner has not been revealed.

Via BoingBoing.

Treasure

"Workers found large number of ancient coins at a construction site in Baishui county of Weinan, Northwest China's Shaanxi province which, according to archaeologists, mostly belong to the Song Dynasty (960-1279)...

Archaeologists later arrived at the site and collected about 100,000 coins, weighing 460 kilograms... initial analysis showed that the coins belong to the old-style Chinese private bank that buried the coins during wars."

Not treasure

As reported by NBC News:

A Missouri woman was out gardening in her yard last week when she discovered something unexpected in her grapevines — a World War II era Japanese bomb.

Lovett was using the Google Lens tool to try to identify the strange object, which Coffey initially thought was a deep sea diving weight. The online search led them both to realize it was likely a bomb... It was determined that the bomb, even in its old age, was live and still had a 500-ft. blast range. "It wasn't just the shell. This thing was live. They confirmed it," said Coffey.

There is still no reasonable explanation as to how this bomb could have wound up buried on their property...

A tip of the blogging cap to a reader for finding an NPR article about Japanese balloon bombs. 

15th-century Ming dynasty bowl found in yard sale

"A small bowl bought for just $35 (£25) at a market sale in the US state of Connecticut has turned out to be a rare 15th-Century Chinese artefact. 

The white porcelain bowl was spotted by an unidentified antiques enthusiast near New Haven last year, and they quickly sought an expert evaluation. The experts came back with good news, revealing that the bowl is thought to be worth between $300,000 and $500,000.

In fact, it is believed to be one of only seven such bowls in existence and most of the others are in museums."

Addendum:  Here is the Sotheby's listing (with a detailed description and additional photos).  The bowl realized $721,800 USD.

Metal detecting in a river

The discussion thread suggests that many of those would be wedding bands intentionally thrown away, not accidentally lost.

I got excited about "coinshooting" decades ago; never found enough to pay for the detector, but it was fun searching.

Lost treasures

Found on a Michigan farm

Last Monday, farmer James Bristle and his neighbor were digging a trench to install a drainage pipe in his wheat field on the outskirts of Chelsea, Michigan, when their backhoe suddenly struck something hard about eight feet underground. At first, the pair thought they had hit a buried piece of wood, perhaps a fence post, but they soon realized they had uncovered something neither had ever seen before—an enormous three-foot-long bone... 

Using zip lines attached to a backhoe, the paleontologists carefully hoisted the mammoth’s gigantic skull and tusks and placed it on a flatbed trailer along with the skeleton’s vertebrae, ribs, pelvis and shoulder blades before filling in the pit... 

The mammoth’s remains still need to be dated, but Fisher said the bones are from an adult male that likely lived between 11,700 and 15,000 years ago and was in its 40s when it died. The paleontologist said the specimen was a Jeffersonian mammoth—a hybrid between a woolly mammoth and a Columbian mammoth named for founding father Thomas Jefferson, who had a keen interest in paleontology. 

Fisher noted there was “excellent evidence of human activity” associated with the mammoth remains, and he theorizes that ancient humans carved the animal and submerged the carcass in a pond to preserve the meat for later use. “We think that humans were here and may have butchered and stashed the meat so that they could come back later for it,” he said. The evidence included three basketball-sized boulders found with the remains—which may have been used to weigh down the carcass—a stone flake resting next to one of the tusks that could have been used as a cutting tool and the positioning of the neck vertebrae in correct anatomical sequence as opposed to a random scattering that normally happens after a natural death.

And this related material via Neatorama:

Mammoths lived on North America's mainland until about 10,000 years ago, but they survived in two places for much longer: St Paul Island and Wrangel Island, in the Russian Arctic, where teeth have been found that are only 4,000 years old... 

St Paul is a volcanic island that until around 9,000 years ago was connected to the mainland by the Bering Land Bridge, which enabled animals to roam freely to and fro. 

But as the climate warmed and sea levels rose, it became isolated – and the mammoths were trapped... there had been a severe weather event, a drought, on St Paul Island. The lake started to dry up and the mammoths were left with nothing to drink. 

Dr Shapiro warns the isolation that killed the mammoths on St Paul is threatening other species and biodiversity today. 

"Islandization takes different forms where the habitats that we've chosen to protect are surrounded not by water, but by other things like farms and agriculture."

It's striking to realize that 4000 years ago (2,000 B.C.) would be contemporaneous with pharaohs ruling Egypt, the cuneiform alphabet, Stonehenge, and the Chinese Bronze Age.

Treasure found in a coal bin

"Funny story is that i sold the 4 tons of coal that was inside to random people that dug it out of the container under no particuliar surveillance but they didnt found it under all the coal dust at the bottom. In french law they should have split it in half with me, if they told me about it anyway. :D" 

The image below shows the bin. Apparently as he was selling off the coal, he or the customers busted the concrete walls of the bin to be able to access the contents.

The coins are dated 1947.

Garage sale treasure

YouTube link.

In 2017 at ROADSHOW’s St. Louis event, Asian Arts appraiser Robert Waterhouse was approached by a guest named Ellen, who brought in a broken sculpture that was worth far more than might immediately meet the eye. Ellen said she purchased the figure... at a garage sale for $75 to $100...

He gives her a staggeringly high estimate of its value, but his estimate is staggeringly too low.

Fugio cent bought for 50c from a junk box at a flea market

A 50 cent flea market find has been certified as a rare 1776 pewter Continental Currency dollar valued at $97,500. The buyer spotted it in a junk box full of assorted coins at a market in Northern France in June 2018. He was curious about this unusual American piece and agreed to shell out half a euro (56 American cents)...

Both obverse and reverse were designed by Benjamin Franklin. The inscriptions and iconography on the obverse were meant to be read as a rebus. Fugio, meaning “I flee” in Latin, connects to the sun which casts shadow on the sundial.  “Mind your business” didn’t mean what it means now. It’s literal, as in “see to your business interests.” All together, the obverse advises that time is fleeting, so mind your business. The reverse is an appeal for unity among states rendered as a linked chain.

Unable to secure anything like the amount of silver necessary for coinage issue, the Continental Currency coin never was circulated. They went with paper money instead, and it was an unmitigated disaster of devaluation and counterfeiting.

More info at The History Blog.

The upside of a hurricane

Reportedly found on the Atlantic shoreline of Virginia after Dorian, via [image cropped for size].

The treasures of Padmanabhaswamy Temple

Padmanabhaswamy Temple is located in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. The temple is built in an intricate fusion of the indigenous Kerala style and the Tamil style (kovil) of architecture associated with the temples located in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu, featuring high walls, and a 16th-century Gopuram... The principal deity Vishnu is enshrined in the "Anantha Shayanam" posture, the eternal yogic sleep on the serpent Adisheshan.

The Temple has been referred to in the (only recorded) Sangam Period of literature between 500 BCE and 300 CE several times. Many conventional historians and scholars are of the opinion that one of the names that the Temple had - "The Golden Temple" - literally was in cognizance of the fact that the Temple was already unimaginably wealthy by that point. Many extant pieces of Sangam Tamil literature and poetry, and even the later works of Ninth Century Tamil poet-saints like Nammalwar, refer to the Temple and even the city as having walls of pure gold. At some places, both the Temple and the entire city are often eulogized even as being made of gold, and the Temple as Heaven

While vault B remains unopened, vaults A, C, D, E and F were opened along with some of their antechambers. Among the reported findings, are a three-and-a-half feet tall solid pure golden idol of Mahavishnu, studded with hundreds of diamonds and rubies and other precious stones. Also found were an 18-foot-long pure gold chain, a gold sheaf weighing 500 kg (1,100 lb), a 36 kg (79 lb) golden veil, 1200 'Sarappalli' gold coin-chains that are encrusted with precious stones, and several sacks filled with golden artifacts, necklaces, diadems, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, gemstones, and objects made of other precious metals. Ceremonial attire for adorning the deity in the form of 16-part gold anki weighing almost 30 kilograms (66 lb), gold coconut shells studded with rubies and emeralds, and several 18th century Napoleonic era coins were found amongst many other objects. In early 2012, an expert committee had been appointed to investigate these objects, which include lakhs of golden coins of the Roman Empire, that were found in Kottayam, in Kannur District. According to Vinod Rai, the former Comptroller-and-Auditor-General(CAG) of India, who had audited some of the Temple records from 1990, in August 2014, in the already opened vault A, there is an 800 kg (1,800 lb) hoard of gold coins dating to around 200 BCE, each coin priced at over 2.7 crore (US$390,000). Also found was a pure Golden Throne, studded with hundreds of diamonds and other fully precious stones, meant for the 18-foot-long Deity. As per one of the men, who was among those that went inside this Vault A, several of the largest diamonds were as large as a full-grown man's thumb. According to varying reports, at least three, if not more, of solid gold crowns have been found, studded with diamonds and other precious stones. Some other media reports also mention hundreds of pure gold chairs, thousands of gold pots and jars, among the articles recovered from Vault A and its antechambers.

This revelation has solidified the status of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple as the wealthiest place of worship in the world. It is conservatively estimated that the value of the monumental items is close to 1.2 lakh crore or 1.2 trillion (US$17 billion). If the antique and cultural value were taken into account these assets could be worth ten times the current market price. 

More at the link. Photo cropped for size and adjusted for exposure and contrast from the original.