Shifting "Pair o' Dimes"

August 28, 2012

One July a few years ago the Archaeological Field School was digging and screening down at Makauwahi Cave, in an upper layer that I had told them “might be late 19th or early 20th century” based on manufactured items we had found. I mentioned that the ideal way to date sediments too young for radiocarbon dating like this was to find something (like a gold or silver coin, I joked) with a date on it. The layer has to be about that age, or younger the reasoning goes.

The 1895-S Barber Dime

One of the students called out a while later, “Dr. Burney, there’s a silver coin on my screen.” When I washed it off and looked at the front for the date, and the back for the mint mark (I was a coin collector from an early age), I nearly fainted: it was an 1890-something Barber dime with an S (San Francisco) mint mark. The last digit was covered with a layer of corrosion, but I didn’t dare scratch it off with my fingernail for fear of damaging the date. Why?

Because one of the rarest coins in the U.S. mintage is the 1894-S Barber dime, a Holy Grail of coin collectors. Only 24 were struck, the proof set for the dies, when the run was canceled for the year at this mint. The superintendent gave some to banker friends, and his daughter bought ice cream with one of them. Only nine have ever been found. The last one that was sold fetched a handy $1.9 million in 2007. Maybe, I thought, one wound up here somehow. But such incredibly rare coins have sometimes been counterfeited, so I didn’t dare do anything to damage that last digit and put it into question.

I didn’t say too much about it, not wanting to raise false hopes, just bagged the coin carefully and kept it close for the rest of the day. That night, I did what any numismatist would do, I guess. I soaked the coin in fresh water, taking it out every hour or so and wiping the corrosion over the date carefully with a Q-tip, looked at it under my magnifier, then put it back in the water to soak off the dratted corrosion.

Along about midnight, the last digit shined through the corrosion: 1895-S! Missed it by one year! My coin book indicated that it was worth about $50, not $2 million. What a difference one year can make. An 1894-S dime could have “shifted our paradigm,” for sure, as I had been saying for some time, ironically, that an endowment of just that amount would assure that the Makauwahi Cave Reserve would be a permanent asset to the community, long after Lida and I join the fossil record.

So if you have a couple of million in pocket change you would like to unload on our little non-profit (or an 1894-S Barber dime), you know how to reach us!

By David Burney