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Message:: [QUOTE="valente151, post: 1257745, member: 27564"]I think I may be the only one here that actually collects these! I have put together a full set of the 2001 Silver and 4 Gold Eagles. I think its an interesting collection. I also exhibited the set this July at the NH Coin and Currency Expo, for which I placed first in the Young Numismatist category. I thought I would share the text and photo portions of the exhibit, along with pictures of my five coins. BTW, I apologize for the varying and distracting text sizes. It was hard to copy and paste the test from my word files for the exhibit. Main Background: When the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, over $200 Million worth of gold, silver and other precious metals were buried in the rubble. Stored in a COMEX vault under the World Trade Center Building 4 were over 825,000 thousand tons of gold bullion in coin and bar form, over 102 million ounces of silver, the largest hoard of silver in the world, and an untold amount of platinum. Held by COMEX, this stockpile was comprised of their own clients gold, silver, and platinum investments and also 24,000 ounces of their own gold that they used to trade futures on the markets. These COMEX vaults represented just a portion of the precious objects that were stored at the World Trade Center. Other clients with vaults included the US Treasury, who, interestingly, stored the lone legal example of the 1933 Double Eagle in their vaults before moving it to Fort Knox just two months before 9/11. Following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the finding and removal of bullion was the last thing on anybody's mind, but on October 30, 2001, excavation crews came across a cache of gold, silver and platinum, buried in a collapsed wing of the building. Armed with rifles and automatic weapons, federal agents swept in and secured the area, letting only a select few excavators into the wing to further excavate the bullion. By 7:00 PM, the first of two Brinks trucks had left the scene and was on it's way to deliver the bullion to Collector's Universe, the father company of PCGS and other collectible certification services. Over the course of several months, a selection of these gold, silver and platinum coins were graded Gem Uncirculated and encapsulated in special slabs by Collector's Universe, and then released to be sold to collectors for a premium, raising money for the victim's of the disaster and their families. The five coins featured in this exhibit are all dated 2001, the rarest date to find in the World Trade Center Recovery series. Included is the 2001 silver eagle and all four denominations of 2001 gold eagles: $5, $10, $25, and $50. They are all graded Gem Uncirculated. Slab Information: The coins were slabbed by Collector's Universe (CU), the parent company of PCGS. Because CU is not a grading company, the coins slabbed by them were given a grade of Gem Uncirculated, rather than a more specific numerical grade. When CU encapsulated the coins, they used the plastic PCGS slabs, with the PCGS logo on the bottom right hand corner embedded in the plastic. In order to distinguish between a typical PCGS slab and these special CU 9/11 slabs, a CU hologram was added to the back of the slab instead of the PCGS hologram, as seen below.   [ATTACH=CONFIG]135824[/ATTACH] Label on left is wtc slab, right is normal PCGS slab. Label Information: The label was designed by Collector's Universe specially for the World Trade Center Ground Zero Recovery bullion coins. The label has a patriotic American Flag background and also is labeled, pedigreeing the coins to the World Trade Center. In the bottom left-hand corner of some of the labels is a number labeling the coin as 1 of some number. When the coins were distributed, Collector's Universe put some of the coins into sets. For example, Collector's Universe released 531 numbered sets of the 2001 $5, $10, $25 and $50 Gold Coins together. The numbers in the bottom left-hand corners of the label denote the coins as being part of these sets. They do not denote how many total coins of each denomination were recovered and released. In the collection displayed here, the coins were acquired separately from sellers that broke up these sets, and therefore the numbers are different on the coins. Below is a listing of some of the sets that Collector's Universe released and the number of individual sets of that type. [TABLE="width: 407"][TR][TD="width: 124"]Number of Sets[/TD][TD="width: 265"]Set Composition[/TD][/TR][TR][TD="width: 124"]1 of 150[/TD][TD="width: 265"]Gem Uncirculated 2001 $25 and $50 Gold Coins[/TD][/TR][TR][TD="width: 124"]1 of 269[/TD][TD="width: 265"]Gem Uncirculated 2001 $1 Silver and $5, $10, $25, and $50 Gold Coins[/TD][/TR][TR][TD="width: 124"]1 of 531[/TD][TD="width: 265"]Gem Uncirculated 2001 $5, $10, $25 and $50 Gold Coins[/TD][/TR][TR][TD="width: 124"]1 of 1440[/TD][TD="width: 265"]Gem Uncirculated 2001 $1 Silver and $5 Gold Coins[/TD][/TR][/TABLE] [ATTACH=CONFIG]135826[/ATTACH] Completed Exhibit:[ATTACH=CONFIG]135830[/ATTACH] Coins: [ATTACH=CONFIG]135832[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]135833[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]135834[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]135831[/ATTACH][ATTACH]135835.vB[/ATTACH] Brinks Removal:[ATTACH]135836.vB[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]

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