So today...I completed my orientation and am now a State employee rather than a contractor! I have the rest of the day off and figured I'd stop by the library... Usually they have nothing but a handful of slightly older coin guides like Red Books but today there was this gem. I've never seen it, been in Colorado for about 30 years and I'm always watching for unusual coin books. 128 pages...I'll finish it in a sitting or two, nice.
Cool! I was born in Colorado Springs and my parents had an artist friend who lived in Victor and Cripple Creek for a while. We went panning for gold up in the streams around there. I remember my parents bought a few silver bars when we were there as well. This was 20+ years ago.
That sounds like some good stuff growing up I'd love to know if anyone here in the forum actually owns one of these octagonal silver coins?!
I actually own a copy of this book and haven't gotten around to reading it. Let us know how it is. It's going to be a while before I get to it.
Some beautiful examples of the Lesher dollars are on display at the ANA museum. They also show up at coin shows in the Colorado area- I’ve seen prices range from a couple thousand to tens of thousands. Too rich for my budget but really cool to see.
I've lived here for going on 35 years and never heard of him. I wonder what his family tree looks like - my kids went to Lesher Middle School, but that's named after a former superintendent. I like the mountain/mint design. The era must have driven people crazy, with the price of actual silver half of the face value of silver coins.
Wouldn't have really mattered to them at all, as long as they could get the silver coins. Nope, silver is silver and coins are coins. The coins had a face value they would be accepted at no matter what the price of silver was, and silver had a free market price set by the commodity markets. The price of silver had been dropping ever since the 1860/70's with all the silver coming out of the western mines, and the demonetization of silver by several nations in Europe. By the 1930's silver got down to around 25 cents an oz. (So a silver dollar had about 18 cents worth of silver in it. So one silver dollar with 18 cents worth of silver in it would buy 4 oz. of silver bullion.) I have a copy of the book, it is interesting. I don't have any Lesher Dollars, but one of the member of one of the local clubs did collect them. I believe he had 8 to 10 varieties.
