subject: 'regulated' Gold Coins Could Sell For Up To $80,000 [print this page] After the United States won its independence from England, trade exploded between the major seaports of the northeast and the islands of the West Indies. Ships were laden with foodstuffs, finished goods and that most desirable trade item of all, gold.
Remarkably productive mines in Brazil made Portuguese gold the dominant gold coinage of early America. Varying weights and values of these pieces, however, made them a challenging medium.
"With typical American ingenuity, some of the continent's best-known goldsmiths solved this problem by regulating the circulating gold medium, marking coins of appropriate weight with their hallmark while plugging coins that were underweight," says Cristiano Bierrenbach, vice president of international numismatics at Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries. "This phenomenon later became widespread throughout the West Indies, and it has been within collections of this specialty where many of these important American artifacts have long been hidden from view."
Heritage's World Coins ANA auction in Boston, scheduled for Aug. 12-16, 2010, includes dozens of examples produced by some of America's best-known silver and goldsmiths of the 18th century. Some are expected to sell for up to $80,000. The counterstamps of regulators Ephraim Brasher, Joseph Richardson, Robert Cruikshank, Myer Myers, and Daniel Van Voorhis are found on a host of coins from several countries, including Brazil, Portugal, Spain and England.
The usual rules of numismatic value do not apply to these "regulated" coins, Bierrenbach points out. "Their enhanced value is created by actions that would reduce the value of other coins, such as drilling, plugging, and counterstamping. Indeed, these dynamic processes enrich their history and value."
Newly discovered smiths will be described in the auction catalog and offered publicly for the first time, Bierrenbach says. "The catalog, including never before published information on smiths, weight standards, provenance and more, will become a textbook in a field that has suffered from a lack of information."
