The Fairmont Collection/Hoard

Apparently there were 147 Double Eagles in the collection; this Hendricks subset may or may not have included them all when it went up for sale earlier this year:

https://coinweek.com/auctions-news/...es-20-double-eagles-from-fairmont-collection/

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

One more than I have at any time

 

i would love to afford a coin from this collection but i can barely afford my rent its too dang high

 

Update on the Fairmont Hoard...another sale.....they go on and on and on....outside of mega-collections like Eliasberg which took multi-year time outs on their sales....I can't recall another Hoard going for this long.

https://raregoldcoins.com/blog/2023...t-the-most-recent-fairmont-sale-november-2023

The 1983 El Salvador (~49,000 coins) and 1996 Wells Fargo No Motto Saints Hoards (~19,900 coins) each got sold within a few years from what I have read.

 

Fairmont Collection/Hoard @ Doug Winter Website: Guest blogger Richard Radick (must be a collector or dealer) has done a spectacular 6-part (so far ! ) deep dive into the Fairmont Collection, focusing on the 8,000 or so graded/certified coins and their impact on the various coins and grades.

It's very complicated...involves math and lots of assumptions...but it's the BEST (only ?) deep-dive that attempts to pierce the veil of secrecy that has surrounded a massive hoard (or group of collections, multiple bank holdings, whatever) that have been merged together into what must be the LARGEST hoard/collection in my records.

They've been selling this for 7 years now....beats 1908 No-Motto, SSCA, etc.

Anyway, here's the deep dive. You can read the individual parts solo but I think you learn the most and best by starting with Part 1 (which was a year ago in December 2023) so that you have the entire picture:

https://raregoldcoins.com/blog?category=Market Blog

 

Update over at DW site on the Carson City coins of the Fairmont Collection.

https://raregoldcoins.com/blog/2025/2/21/fairmont-gold-pieces-part-ix-the-carson-city-coins

GDJMSP....have you been following how the Guest Blogger has been using the PCGS Population Reports to construct "time series" and estimate the size of the Fairmont Collection/Hoard ?

Fascinating stuff.

 

I have seen some of these coins on the bay bringing big premiums !

 

Fairmont Collection/Hoard is over...no more sales.

8,300 PCGS-certified coins.....over 400,000 gold coins in total.....coins believed rare WERE in fact rare; very few found like some rare Carson City's......coins believed to be pretty common were in fact even MORE common in MS and lower grades.

9-part series over at Doug Winter includes fascinating but detailed statistical probability analysis trying to determine the origins of the hoard and the coins we could expect to see and have seen.

 

Did they have cup holders back then?

 

I'm not sure what you are asking....

 

The blue thunder car of @LakeEffect Sorry I didn't make myself clear, no offense to the post.

 

The Ford Fairmont? They sure did...

 

Wow, that interior looks great for its age. Thanks for the pic.

 

a true classic

 

Wow! A stick shift on a car and an ashtray? I'm so lucky to see it for my own eyes.

 

And a clean cup holder. No coins in there!

 

Great wrap-up article by RR on the ending of the Fairmont Collection auctions (still stuff in inventory) and highlights of the massive find:

https://raregoldcoins.com/blog/2025/5/14/fairmont-gold-pieces-part-x-recapitulation

 

Just under 400,000 total coins in the hoard (estimated).....8,300 coins were graded AND certified as "FAIRMONT COLLECTION".....about 1,500 of those have not been sold and are with large, online gold retailers....close to 90% or 350,000 coins were graded but NOT certified as "FAIRMONT".....another 20,000 - 40,000 coins were not deemed worth enough to get graded at all.

Hopefully SBG or the owners of the hoard give out details in the future but I'm not optimistic.

 

...Among these coins, the single 1870-CC eagle among the Fairmonts that graded PCGS G-6 stands out like the proverbial sore thumb. It seems inconceivable that the only Carson City coin in the Fairmont hoard with a grade this low would also be a leading rarity - rather, I suspect, the only 1870-CC eagle in the Fairmont hoard also happened to be a low-grade coin. Surely, if there is one low-grade 1870-CC Fairmont eagle, there must also be dozens, or even hundreds, of similarly low-grade Fairmonts for the more common issues.

Accordingly, one approach to estimating the number of ungraded Fairmonts is to compare the low end of the grade distribution for Fairmonts with the corresponding tail of the distribution for all PCGS-graded coins, as I did in the third article in this series. The numbers are uncomfortably soft, but various analyses consistently suggest that the missing low-grade tail of the Fairmont distribution is perhaps 5% - 10% of the total.

There is, in fact, little incentive to have worn common-date gold coins graded, Fairmont or otherwise – their numismatic value exceeds their bullion value only slightly, and the difference is, oftentimes, comparable to the grading cost. Indeed, I think it is likely that some ungraded Fairmont coins have been consigned directly to SBG’s Precious Metals (i.e., bullion) sales during the past several years. For example, in mid-2020, SBG sold several hundred ungraded common-date half eagles in their Precious Metals sales, including 115 moderately-worn 1895 $5 coins. About the same time in mid-2020, my time series show that PCGS graded almost 1,700 non-pedigreed Fairmont 1895 $5 coins. It is tempting to connect the two events: the better coins were sent to PCGS for grading, and the numismatically less attractive coins (about 7% of the total) were consigned directly to the bullion sales.

However, I tend to discount stories that truly large numbers of badly worn and/or damaged Fairmont coins have been culled and (perhaps) melted. The reason is that, if anything, the Fairmont hoard seems to be characterized by too few examples of rarities, relative to the more common dates. This feature would disappear in the face of wholesale culling of common-date coins."