How widely were gold coins dispersed in the US

Tom_in_CA Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> SeabeeRon Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
>
> >
> >
> > Hey Brian, I was thinking of this find in SF. W
> as
> > it Montera Tom or something like that who made t
> he
> > find?
> >
> >
>
> Yes. Tom from Montara passed away several years
> ago. The story, as he told to me, was that his w
> ife (who was an avid bottle digger) was digging bo
> ttles at San Francisco oldtown demolition site.
> He hopped in with his detector, and began to find
> these gold coins. Brian (cal cobra) is saying "3
> 0". I don't recall Tom's count being that high.
> But it certainly wasn't that many from this indivi
> dual site. Because he also had a few single coins
> (another 3 ? or 4 ?) from other locations aside f
> rom the singular demolition site. So maybe it wa
> s 20-something from the single demolition site.
>
> As I recall the story, they got booted by the 2nd
> or 3rd day in there. And he never went back. If
> it were me, uh.... 2am would have been mighty temp
> ting. I also asked Tom if he had tried to fi
> nd out where any off-haul dirt had been hauled to.
> He said he didn't do that, and later regretted not
> thinking of that.
>
> He deduced that his gold coins, from that single l
> ot, were most likely from a cache that the heavy e
> quipment must have broken into, and scattered arou
> nd the site during the bulldozer wrecking-ball pro
> cess.

Thanks Tom, that is how I remember the story going!
Sure miss Jeff Kinzli and the California Detecting Forum!!

SeabeeRon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Cal_cobra Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> Hey Brian, I was thinking of this find in SF. Was it Montera Tom or something like that who made the find?
>
> Sure miss the old California Detecting forum!
>
> There was also that couple who stumbled across those cans of gold coins on their property a few years back. Speculation was they may have come from a SF Mint heist.

Hey Ron,

Yes it was MT. He told me the story once when we were at GGP. Apparently his wife worked for a construction company, and they were doing a demo on an old San Francisco building. While the excavator operator was digging, he saw a gold coin roll out of the dirt. MT's wife was tipped off and it was game on. I think MT surmised that it had been someone's savings that was lost in the fires the preceded the 1906 quake. I don't recall how many they found exactly, but it was something like 15 or so.

There's also a spot he did okay at over in Vallejo where they'd built a school where an old ranch house was, and apparently when they demo'd one of the ranch buildings, someone had squirreled away jars of gold coins and they got scattered about the school fields. I'm up to two gold coins now, but all found in the wild, no caches like MT was fortunate enough to land.

I followed the story of the cans of gold coins that couple found and recall in the beginning there was speculation they may have been from a San Francisco mint theft, but that was later cleared as they matched the coins and dates the couple found with the log of coins stolen from the mint and it wasn't a match. Talk about winning the lottery!

Hope you're doing well and I too miss the Kinzli forum, sad that it just went to pot.

Abenson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Since my post in 2019 I've added 2 more $1 gold coins to my collection. Both found with the Minelab Equinox 800 11" coil. Both were located in quite a bit of iron trash.

That mimics my second gold coin, right after applying the iron bias firmware upgrade and using NASA Tom's iron hunting settings. It was pretty amazing as I know Tom_CA and I had both covered that exact patch of ground, as well as other patches at that site, but the Equinox really opened that site up for me. Pretty amazing to consider all the other detectors that had been through it to pull a $1 gold coin and dozens of seateds. Given the history of this particular site, I would not be one bit surprised to dig another gold coin, at least I'm hoping too



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2021 08:12PM by Cal_cobra.