Riches Beyond Our Wildest Dreams

The chimney is gone, and now all the remaining bricks have been dropped to the basement.  The broken bricks have all been removed from the basement and loaded into a truck to be taken away.  The huge pile of bricks to go to MLK are still sitting in the basement - we'll get to that unlovely job soon enough.

Looking down the chimney shaft, with one last brick falling from attic to basement

But today we had a windfall.  Whenever you hear stories of home improvement, you invariably hear stories of people finding incredible valuables in old houses.  From these stories, one would gather that people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries didn't trust banks, so they stored all their riches in the walls and floorboard of their houses, and then either promptly forgot about them, or died before they could breathe a word about it to anyone.

Unlike the discovers of gold bricks inside the sewing room walls, or the guy who found an original copy of the Declaration of Independence stuck in an old picture frame, we have never been that lucky.  Despite the fact that the Walnut Street house is the 8th house we've restored, we haven't found riches or jewelry or boxes of expensive silver secreted within the wall studs.

Until today.

When cleaning out the dust around the chimney chase, I dislodged a small leather item that fell to the basement, where Tom picked it up.  It was an old leather change purse, and it had money inside it.

Okay, so the coins added up to only 21 cents.  But the coins were old: a buffalo nickel from 1916, another one from 1925, a 1916 Mercury dime, and a wheat straw penny from 1925.  All the coins were marked with an "S" indicating that they were minted in San Francisco.   Maybe these were rare and of untold value?

The change purse and the valuable coins it contained

In researching our find, I learned that 1916 nickels tend to be pretty valuable.  When some of them were struck, the date created a double image, so the "6" could be seen twice.  These are considered to be "very valuable in circulated condition."  Some of the estimates I saw online were upwards of $6000.  (In mint/uncirculated condition, they are worth over $100,000.)

Some 1916 Mercury dimes are also worth around $1500.

Closer examination, however, reveals that our coins don't quite make the grade.  The nickel does not have the double image.  The rare Mercury dimes are from the Denver ("D") Mint.

So the value was somewhat less than we had hoped:

1916-s Buffalo Nickel:  $16.00
1925-s Buffalo Nickel:  $10.50
1916-s Mercury Dime:  $6.50
1925-s Wheat straw Penny: $0.80

We haven't yet found any value for the change purse, but I'm guessing we aren't going to sell it and fund our 401-K with it.

Okay, so maybe "riches beyond our wildest dreams" is an overstatement.  But hey, four coins worth about thirty three dollars and eighty cents?  Maybe we're starting a lucky streak.  Time to buy a lotto ticket.  I might win back my dollar investment.....