A nickel from 1913 is expected to sell for $2.5 million or more. The Associated Press reported that the rare coin which is only one of five in the world is a 1913 Liberty Head nickel with an interesting past.
It was illegally cast and discovered in a car crash that had killed its owner. It was declared a fake only to be found to be real decades later.
The coin will go up for auction on April 25 in Chicago and is expected to go for 2.5 million.
"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., where the coin had been for the past ten years. "A lot of this is ego. I have one of these and nobody else does," he added collectors could think.
The owners of the coin are four siblings from Virginia who kept the coin even when people said it was 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," reported The AP.
George O. Walton was said to have purchased the coin in the mid 1940s for $3,750 and he kept the coin until the day he died in a car crash in 1962. It was found amongst hundreds of other coins that were scattered at the site of his crash.
His sister, Melva Givens, was given the coin after experts said it was fake because they believed a date on it had been altered with.
"For whatever reason, she ended up with the coin," her daughter, Cheryl Myers, said to the AP. The coin remained in Givens closet for the next thirty years till her death in 1992.
Myer's brother who was the executor of his mother's estate said the coin caught his eye. Eventually him and his siblings brought the coin to the 2003 American Numismatic Association World's Fair of Money where the other four 1913 Liberty nickels were exhibited. A team of experts deemed the coin real there.
The rest as they say, is history.
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