Just another reason why I love my job. I had the pleasure of purchasing the largest horde of Colonial currency I have seen. There are 70 notes in this lot most all are Pennsylvania. Dated from 1759-1777. I havent even begun to research & price these bad boys but I did check for signatures ,no one outright famous though. The quite a few are in VF condition with a couple better & a few worse. I was blown away by how many were here- has anyone heard of a collection of this size before ? Anyway it was VERY COOL !
My official title is Lead Numismatist.I do more catalogging,research & grading than selling or buying.Im the one they come to for answers in the company I work for. I dont personally consider myself a dealer but thats what most people call me.
There are some bettering house notes in there, they are the notes with the building on them that were used to fund the building of "bettering houses" which were the 18th century equivalent of a special home for people that had fallen on hard times. Those particular notes are pretty desirable. The 1759-1764 notes were printed by Benjamin Franklins company, though not necessarily by him.
Most common colonial notes are listed generically in the Green Sheets. The Pennsylvania notes are one of the most common & in circulated condition fall fairly well in the prices stated on the sheet . The owner had had the collection appraised by another place & knew what the value of the notes should have been from their own resouces. I did referance Heritage for a few to get a better feel for the acceptable quality on TPG grading standards for these prices. And was able to see that 2 of the better date/denominations had some additional value for the owner. This was done in my office so I had the advantage of having good referances at hand. With all of that it still took me all of 1.5 hours to get through them.
I saw a stack of about 25 similar looking notes once but they ended up all being counterfeit. I used to do some etching and engraving in my youth and the professor brought them in as examples of engraving and then told us about how they were made a few years ago and how we could distress our modern prints to make then look like they were from the 18th century.
WOW!!! Budgood...did someone just walk those into the shop? That is a huge collection to say the least! Please do let us know what you find out about them. I can say with all honesty I know little about Colonials...but I find that interesting to say the least!! Thanks for posting those!! RickieB
