Isn’t it amazing how a couple found 10 million dollars in gold coins while walking their dog?

Almost all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in mint condition and uncirculated, said David Hall, co-founder of the Professional Coin Grading Service of Santa Ana, which recently authenticated them.

Although the face value of the gold pieces is only about $27,000, some of them are so valuable that coin experts say they could fetch almost a million dollars each.

It’s fascinating how coins from 150 years ago were used to invest and forget about.

Loot: A hoard of gold coins from the era, advertised in California last year by a couple while walking their dog, may be the largest hoard ever found in the United States, worth more than $10 million .

One of the 19th century American gold coins minted in California by two people who wish to remain anonymous. The value of the “Saddle Ridge Hoard” treasure trove is estimated at $10 million or more.

Show and tell: David Hall (left), co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Service, poses with some of the 1,427 U.S. gold coins, in his Santa Ana office.

“I don’t like to say ‘once in a lifetime’ at all, but you never get a chance to handle this kind of material, a treasure like this,” said Athens numismatist Don Kagin, who represents the diggers. . “It’s like they found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

Kagin, whose family has been in the coin business for 81 years, said little about the couple other than that they are husband and wife, are middle-aged and have lived for several years on the rural property where the coins were found. . He met the couple for the first time last April.

“They have no idea who put the coins there,” he said.

The couple chooses to remain anonymous, Kagin said, in part to avoid a new gold invasion of their property by modern prospectors armed with metal detectors.

However, Kagin’s company posted a brief question-and-answer interview with the couple, identified only as John and Mary, on a website created to market the coins.

Mary realized that the discovery of the coins was predicted by her astrological chart, although she did not realize it at the time.

‘I looked at it again. It’s so funny, my chart talked about treasure, but it was more about treasure of the spirit…’ she said.

And he added: ‘I would never have thought we would have found something like this; However, in some ways I feel like I have been preparing my entire life for it.

Precious exhibits: Some of the 1,427 American period gold coins are on display at the Professional Coin Grading Service in Santa Ana, California.

Most of the coins were minted in San Francisco, but one $5 gold piece came from as far away as Georgia.

California Gold Country: Near the center of the map is Sutter’s Mill, the site of the 1848 find that began the search for gold. Hopeful searchers flocked to the area east of Sacramento to the Nevada line and down through much of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

“John just knew what to do; it was a little karmic… Maybe somehow we were the ones who could honor the coins.”

John and Mary are a self-employed couple in their 40s.

“The family and lawyers investigated who could have put them there, and they found nothing,” Kagin said.

“The closest we can guess is that whoever left the coins could have been involved in the mining industry.”

They also don’t want to be treated any differently, said David McCarthy, chief numismatist at Kagin Inc. of Tiburon.

“Their view was that this would change the way everyone would see them and they are very happy with the lifestyle they have today,” he said.

They plan to put most of the coins up for sale through Amazon and keep some memorabilia. They will use the money to pay bills and quietly donate to local charities, Kagin said.

Before selling them, they are loaning some to the American Numismatic Association for its National Moпeу Exhibition, which opens Thursday in Atlanta.

This image shows one of six decaying metal canisters filled with 19th century American gold coins dumped under the shade of a tree.

Lucky find: tin containing 19th century gold coins displayed on the ground

What makes his find particularly valuable, McCarthy said, is that almost all of the coins are in near-perfect condition. That means whoever buried them probably threw them away as soon as they were put into circulation.

Because paper currency was present in California until the 1870s, he added, it is extremely rare to find coins before that of such high quality.

“It actually wasn’t until the 1880s that you started to see coins minted in California that were maintained at really high levels of preservation,” he said.

The coins, in denominations of $5, $10 and $20, were stored more or less in chronological order, McCarthy said, with pieces from the 1840s and 1850s in one jar until it was filed, then the new coins went to the next and To the next one. after.

The dates and method indicated that whoever put them there was using the land as their personal bank and that they were not thrown all at once into a gorge.

Although most of the coins were minted in San Francisco, one $5 gold piece came from as far away as Georgia.

Coins were stored chronologically: pieces from the 1840s and 1850s went into one bin until it was filed, then new coins went into the next, and the next after that. The dates and method indicated that whoever put them there was using the land as their personal bank.

Kagin and McCarthy would say little about the couple’s property or its ownership history, other than that it is located in a sprawling mountainous area of the Gold Country and the coins were found along a trail the couple had hiked along for years.

The day they were found last spring, the woman had bent over to examine an old trash can that erosion had blown out of the ground.

In total they found eight cans.

“Don’t hesitate to bend over to look through a trash can,” he said she told him.

They are located in a section of the ridge that the couple nicknamed Saddle Ridge, and Kagin calls the find Saddle Ridge Hoard. He believes it could be the largest discovery of its kind in American history.

One of the previous largest finds of gold coins was a million-dollar find discovered by construction workers in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1985. More than 400,000 silver dollars were found in the home of a Reno, Nevada, man. who died in 1974 and was later dreamed of. intact for $7.3 million.

In the 1980s, gold coins and bars were recovered from the wreckage of the SS Central America, said to be worth $130 million. But historians knew roughly where that gold was because the ship sank off the coast of North Carolina during a hurricane in 1857.