By Scott Purvis for CoinLink
A 154-year-old $20 gold piece known as the Kellogg Twenty will return to Baltimore next month for the first time in nearly 30 years.

This  one-of-a-kind California Gold Rush coin was once owned by Baltimore resident and diplomat John Work Garrett, and is considered by most collectors to be one of the finest American coins from the mid-19th century.

John W. Garrett (1872 – 1942) was the grandson of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad executive and one-time president, John Work Garrett (1820 – 1884), and the eldest son of T. Harrison Garrett (1849 – 1888), who began collecting coins as a student at Princeton. The coin collection grew extensively under T. Harrison’s sons, John and Robert (1875 – 1961).

Garrett donated the coin, along with his home, Evergreen House, to the Johns Hopkins University on his death in 1942. Hopkins sold the coin at the Bowers and Ruddy auction in 1980 for $230,000.

Subsequently the coin changed hands several times. Contursi has owned it twice; from 2002 to 2005, and since 2006, it is now valued at $3 million. The coin is graded Specimen-69 by Professional Coin Grading Service

“When you pick up this coin, you’re literally holding Gold Rush history in your hands,” said Steven L. Contursi, president of Rare Coin Wholesalers of Dana Point, Calif., the coin’s owner. “This is a homecoming. It’s the first time it will be publicly seen in Baltimore in 28 years.”

The coin was manufactured on February 9, 1854 by John Glover Kellogg, a former employee of the San Francisco U.S. Assay Office. He gave it to his friend and future business partner, New York City watchmaker, August Humbert, the former U.S. Assayer in San Francisco.

During most of the 20th century, the historic coin was part of the legendary Garrett Collection at Johns Hopkins University and kept in a vault in Baltimore, Maryland. (more…)

An elderly woman walked into the American Saving Bank in Munster, Indiana recently to make a deposit, a $2000  deposit that consisted of two 1934 $1000 Federal Reserve Notes.

Reports said that the woman, who was not identified for security purposes, arrived at the bank Wednesday morning and stepped to a teller window to make a $2,000 deposit. When bank workers saw the two bills, they weren’t sure what to make of them.

Bank teller who handled the deposit, Mary Ann Vlasich, thought to herself, “She’s going to need more bills because there is not nearly enough here for $2,000″, who believed the bills were hundreds.

When she looked closer, Vlasich was shocked to see they were $1,000 bills — a  denomination that no one at the bank had ever seen before, much less handled.

The deposit was accepted and the woman left the bank.

But soon afterward the transaction was brought to the attention of Michael Mellon, American Savings Bank’s president and chief executive officer.

“I’ve seen $500s before, but thousands, especially in this good of a condition, are just really rare. Everyone wanted to take a look at them,” Mellon said.

Realizing that the crisp 1934 bills were worth far more than their $1,000 face value, the bank called the woman and asked her to come down to the bank and pick up the banknotes. As Mellon recounts ….

“We explained it would be to the best interest of everybody if the customer picked up the bills and sold them to get a higher return,” he said. “We are a community bank that really looks out for our customers.”

When the woman came back to the bank she told Mellon the bills came from a relative a long time ago. Asked  what possessed her to bring them into the bank Wednesday she replied ” I have no idea”!

By David Slone

Great figures from coinage systems of the world in ancient times.

Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (646AD - 705AD) was the fifth caliph of the Umayyads, which was the ruling dynasty that built a huge medieval Islamic empire stretching west across North Africa into Spain and as far east as Pakistan. Whilst the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England lacked a written language, Abd al-Malik created the world’s first widespread uniform currency - the dinar.

Previous to his reign (685-705AD), the Arabs used silver Sassanian coins from the Persian empire and gold and copper Byzantine coins from the Byzantine or Roman empire, centered around it’s capital city, Constantinople.

Abd al-Malik had agreed to a decade long truce with the then Byzantine emperor, Justinian ll, a truce which was then broken when the emperor refused to accept al-Malik’s new Islamic coins in place of money bearing a picture of Christ or the cross.

Although the new gold dinars and silver dirhems were very similar in size and weight to the coins they replaced, their design for the day was completely revolutionary. Come 697AD the caliph had abandoned portraits of rulers or emblems of cities to adorn his coins in favor of simplistic inscriptions of verses from the Koran. (more…)

The Justice Department is seeking to permanently keep more than $3 million in coins that were struck by anti-government activists who aimed to create a new currency to compete against the greenback.

In court papers filed in federal court in North Carolina, federal prosecutors say that they need another six months to complete their criminal investigation of the citizens who play a leading role in popularizing the alternative currency, known as the Liberty Dollar.

A prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Asheville, N.C., Thomas Ascik, also sought an order that would give the government title to the more than 7 tons worth of gold, silver, and copper Liberty Dollar coins that the government seized last year in raids in Indiana and Idaho, according to court papers. Just last week, a dozen Liberty Dollar supporters filed suit in U.S. District Court in Idaho demanding the return of the seized coins.

[Editors Comment] Is it any wonder that so many people have a deep seated distrust of the federal government when they use these types of tactics. If they want to investigate possible criminal activity, that is fine, Knock your socks off! But to seize property and then try to gain title is just an arrogant abuse of power.  

By Nicole Garrison-Sprenger
It could double as a shot put, but it’s worth a little too much to chuck in the dirt.

A 22-pound gold coin commemorating the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing is waiting in Burnsville for someone to plunk down $1 million for a piece of history. Now, if you’re a big fan of the Olympics, you could fly to Beijing, stay for a week, watch the Games live and buy a T-shirt for considerably less. But a million dollars for a coin that isn’t even old?

It turns out, a solid-gold coin that weighs as much as a 1-year-old child doesn’t come along every day.

The coin released by the China Mint is the biggest Olympic coin made to date, said Douglas Mudd, a curator at the American Numismatic Association money museum. “Twenty-two pounds — that’s a lot of gold,” he said. At present, Mudd said, “The coin market is very hot. We’re seeing record prices at practically every auction.”

Gold is selling for about $928 an ounce, which would make the jumbo coin that Burnsville-based GovMint.com is selling worth roughly $245,000 melted down. (Precious metals are measured in troy pounds, which contain 12 troy ounces.) Plus, the coin — with the Beijing 2008 Games logo on one side and an image of a Chinese temple towering above Olympic athletes on the other — is one of only 29 issued, and the only one released for sale in the United States. Seven inches in diameter, it comes in an ornate carved box of African Blackwood with a 35-pound carved stone dragon perched on top.

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