Thanks @lordmarcovan for the Holed coins! This the start of my collection. We have here an 1865 IHC, 1869 Nickel,1910 Liberty Nickel, 1857 Seated Half dime and 1900 Barber Half. Plus, a Bonus Coin.
You now have a holey Barber half and I don't! I gave you mine without replacing it (yet). I'll find another.
Your 1910 nickel is a good looking holey and I would have kept it for my own holey collection, but I'm doing a 19th century type set, so 1910 is in the wrong century. I replaced it with an 1899.
@lordmarcovan Yeah, thanks for the Half mix up. Now it's my first Barber Half! I love the 1910 Nickel too! Nice shape for a holed coin.
Now, @SensibleSal66 you are mandated to get a top hat and attach said coins to it, in honor of @lordmarcovan.
Funny, I was looking through some boxes and pulled this out for a closer look. Was it just that pockets were bad and these coins were tiny that this was so common?
I think that was certainly the reason in a lot of cases. Small coins (three-cent silvers, half dimes, gold dollars) are frequently found holed. All three of the half dimes (one Bust, two Seated) that I dug in my detecting days were holed.
They were inexpensive jewelry then. Finding them while metal detecting implies, to me, that the strings they were attached to broke and the small coin was dropped and lost. They just sat there bidding their time to be found.
I'm a bust half dime fan and I see a fair amount of holed coins. In fact, there's a unique baby busty - the 1830 LM-9.3 - that has a hole in it. But now, anyone who aspires to have a complete set of all die marriages / remarriages (as I do) either has to talk the owner out of it, or find another instance of it. Long odds on either of those. So, that holey half dime is probably worth more than anything I currently own! I am told that people would use the little coins as buttons, which may account for some of those oddball ones that have 2 or even 4 holes in them. And of course, people used them as charms on a bracelet. But what I wonder is: how many of them were worn superstitiously as charms (for good luck, or to ward off evil spirits and the like)? I was reading a book sometime in the last year or two that mentioned that kind of thing. But although I made a mental note to save that passage and look into that a bit, I didn't follow through and I've forgotten what book it was. :-(
The initially unique O-129 Draped Bust half dollar discovery coin was on my Holey Coin Vest. I didn’t know it. The discovery was made two owners later.
