I picked this roll up the other day. If either of the end coins had had S mint marks on the back, I'd be sitting pretty. Have you ever gambled on a supposedly unopened roll from the 1960s and 70s? https://www.ebay.com/itm/264876144947 There were 10 Morgans in the roll, all AU58 or better. About what I expected, and at least there weren't any culls inside. How'd I do? (The roll of half dollars I paid for at the same time, however, did not arrive in the package. But that's another issue).
They were in an old (looking) "First Financial & U.S. Trust Corp. / Wall Street, New York / $10.00 DOLLARS / Johnson Fare Box Co, Chicago" wrapper (the last line is pretty faded, so I'm extrapolating). Anyone familiar with the company or when they were in operation? My guess is that this was in the 60s or 70s, when mint bags of dollars were repackaged as bullion investments. Compete list: 1881-S 1883-O 1885-O 1886 1887 1890 1896 1900 1903 1904-O
I’ve always wanted to buy a roll like that. But I am too cynical and untrusting to believe it is unsearched or “original”.
I paid $399.20 for the ten coins the OP listed; one of those was a slabbed 1903 that cost me $91, so that brings the price paid for the other nine down to an average of $34.24. Not all of mine are as nice as the ones in the above photos, not even the slabbed one. There are one or two of these that might be worth $56 to me, though.
What's the likelihood that coins could be stored in old paper like that for decades and show no toning whatever? Doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
If they were truly unsearched, how did the seller know they were all Morgans and there wasn't a Peace dollar or two in there? Besides that, paper coin rolls weren't widely used until the 1930s and 40s. Yes, they were around before that, but their usage was few and far between. Morgans came in BAGS, not rolls.
There were firms that rolled from bags in the 60s and 70s. But, I'm not sure how widespread the practice was, and, while this conglomeration does track with someone pulling together moderate BU coins from various bags, I suspect there's a reason that key & semi-key coins aren't present. They're valuable now because even then they were rare. Presumably, anyone digging through bags was pulling for numismatic value even back then (if they even saw them - you coukd look at 10,000 Morgans pulled at random without seeing anything rare). In that scenario, the only potential to make big money would be on coins that were not recognized as rare before the GSA distributions. But, I felt like taking a gamble. I probably could have picked each coin out individually for less (if I was even hunting for those particular dates), and maybe picked up some neat VAMs along the way. A part of me felt like buying the equivalent of a lottery scratchoff. If the posted odds are 1 out of 3.95 on $5 scratchers that they will pay off at least face value, most of us know that means if we buy 4 tickets, the most likely outcome is to receive a single $5 "winner" out of the group (for a $15 net loss). But, we all convince ourselves that the next group might have a million dollar winner hiding in it. A single BU trade dollar of CC Morgan in this roll would have been a very pleasant surprise!
The seller was pretty clear that any pre-1935 dollar could be in there. They only vouched for the weight of the roll. Some of the other rolls for sale had trade dollars or even seated liberty dollars visible on one end. They went for *insane* money, IMO.
4 of those in MS63 are well above $56 in value. And I suspect that 2 (of the more common dates in the group, unfortunately) might get an MS65 or better nod. Some of the more common dates are surprisingly scarce in high grades.
That font on the roll... I think of that as a 1970s font, maybe 1960s. (This is based on an extensive collection of old SF paperbacks that I haven't looked at in quite some time.) I tried a bit of Googling to narrow down the font's origin, but I wasn't getting anywhere.