Friday, August 8, 2008

Indian Head Pennies Galore!

Last night I was bit bummed about the loss of my source bank and a two hour ride home. I was a bit stressed about my job, too. I did have a lot of fun playing with and holding Henry before supper. I was thinking how nice it is to have a family and feel so positive about the long term. I just didn't feel that when I was single, but now there seems to be no limits. That's a good feeling.

I did some coin roll hunting with the final coins from source #2. I was hoping for something good, so as to go out with a bang, etc. My hopes were met.

75 small dollars, 200 quarters, 950 dimes, and 400 nickels only turned up 2 Canadian dimes and 1 Canadian nickel (1 Ni).

I saved the pennies for last. They were awesome. In 6,800 pennies (one box and some hand rolled coin) I found forty-one Indian Head pennies, twenty-three Wheats, forty-six Canadians, one UK penny, one US dime, and two Bermuda 1 ¢.

That's no typo! I found 41 Indian Heads!

Eighteen of the customer rolls seemed to be from the same person as they were all taped at the ends. I've had good luck with taped rolls before, so I had hopes, but not too high hopes. I soon found out my hope was well founded when the second taped roll I looked at produced two Indian Head pennies. "Two in one roll!," I thought, "that's awesome." To explain my fist pumping I told my wife that I've only found 8 total in over 800,000 pennies searched. A few rolls later I surpassed that "once in a lifetime experience" and found four Indian Head pennies in a roll. At that point I realized something sweet was going on. "Would the other rolls have more Indian Heads or a ton of Wheat pennies!?," I thought. A few rolls later I found a roll with 10 Indian Head pennies and then a roll with with 21 Indian Head pennies. My record breaking stopped there, but I did have a roll with three and one final roll with one (not taped, but probably from the same source).

Strangely there were only two common Wheats in all of the taped rolls. I did find two good Canadians in the taped rolls, however, 1935, a George V, and 1937, an early George VI.



Most of the IH's are in good or less condition. Three of them are definitely better than good and have full Liberty. The dates of the Indian Heads were:

1882, 1883, 1887, 1889, 1893(2), 1896, 1897, 1899(3), 1900(2), 1901(2), 1902(2), 1903(3), 1905(2), 1906(8), 1907(5), 1908(2), 1909(4)

This certainly helps make up for the loss of a good source and coming just two weeks after the gold coin find from the same bank I feel incredibly blessed and lucky. I never thought I would find thirteen new penny varieties at once. I'm feeling very encouraged in pursuit of my goal of searching 1 million pennies.

The Wheats were:

1917, 1930, 1935D, 1941(5), 1942, 1945D, 1946(3), 1947, 1948, 1950D, 1951, 1952D(3), 1953D, 1955(4), 1955D, 1956(3), 1956D(4)

Found: 1 penny (at the car wash), 1 dime (at the car wash)

3 comments:

James (UK) said...

Yay! Some good news for once!

Do agree with you over the "taped rolls from the same person" comment.

When I used to trawl "Car boot" sales (aka flea markets) over here, if you saw one old retro Atari 2600 game, it would be likely that the same person had other bits from that area, and I used to go into "super-crap-sifting" mode. ;-)

Thom said...

That's one incredible find. Many congrats!

Syruss said...

Wow! nice find!