The Great Kentucky Hoard of Gold Dollars

In what has been dubbed the “Great Kentucky Hoard” a man in the Bluegrass State found a cache of Civil War era coins in a field on his property. These coins date to the Civil War era and most are made of 90% gold. The gold coins are mostly Liberty Dollars, made from the 1840s to 1860s. While many of the coins are valuable US gold dollars, there are also handful of even more valuable “finest-known” 1863 Double Eagle coins in extremely good condition and some in mint condition! Some of these coins are worth 6 figures on their own, making this an extremely valuable find.

For a variety of reasons many people in the South hid money and assets from both the Union and the Confederacy. In some cases Confederate soldiers even hid money from their superiors. Of the recorded caches of money hidden during this era, very few are known to have been recovered, which may mean that there’s a lot more gold out there waiting to be found.

So how did this man get so lucky? Well as a farmer he was working in his field when he found the coins and once he started digging he found more and more. In all there are more than 800 coins in the hoard.

The coins are being sold through GovMint.com, who say on their site that these treasures were a loss for the people who buried them, but are “a gain for today’s collectors”.

The coins were appraised and verified through the Numismatic Guaranty Company (NGC). The location of the cache and the identity of the farmer have been kept hidden for obvious reasons. You can see a short clip of the coins being found in 2023 in the video below.