RICHMOND, Va. — A humble 5-cent coin with a storied past is headed to auction and bidding 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 all adds up to an expected sale of $2.5 million or more when it goes on the auction block this spring in suburban Chicago.
“Basically a coin with a story and a rarity will trump everything else,” said Douglas Mudd, curator of the American Numismatic Association Money Museum in Colorado Springs, Colo., which has held the coin for most of the past 10 years. He expects it could fetch more than Heritage Auction’s estimate, perhaps $4 million and even up to $5 million.
“A lot of this is ego,” he said of collectors who could bid for it. “I have one of these and nobody else does.”
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 weren’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.
“For whatever reason, she ended up with the coin,” her daughter, Cheryl Myers, said.
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.
Since its authentication, the Walton nickel has been on loan to the Colorado Springs museum and has been publicly exhibited nationwide.
The coin will be up for grabs April 25 at a rare coin and currency auction.
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