New Light Shed on Mysterious Past of 1913 Liberty Head Nickel PART I
Editor’s Note: This is the first part of a two-part feature detailing newly uncovered information on the first showing of the 1913 Liberty Head nickel and the coin’s subsequent rise to the status of a million-dollar rarity.
On July 11, 1934, 63 members of the Chicago Coin Club gathered at the Atlantic Hotel, in downtown Chicago, for the club’s 185th meeting. President J. Henri Ripstra, a founding member of this now 100+-year-old club, called the meeting to order.
Among the topics of discussion was the mysterious 1913 Liberty Head nickel – a coin that shouldn’t exist. Nineteen thirteen was the year of the change to the Indian head/bison motif, by James Earle Fraser. Therefore, no 1913-dated coins with the prior Liberty head design, by Charles Barber, likely should have been minted. Yeet five examples are known. Each of which would bring millions, if offered at auction.
Specifically, the CCC members talked about the 1913 Liberty Head nickel’ss first exhibition at an earlier CCC meeting. The reference was with little doubt to the 1919 visit of Samuel W. Brown to the CCC’s Dec. 3, 1919, meeting at the Hotel Sherman, first detailed in my 2017 Numismatic News article.
That 1919 meeting, Brown’s s later advertisements and a strange reference to well-known collector William F. Dunham, as we shall see, sparked a nationwide search for the coins – well before Texas coin dealer B. Max Mehl cemented his place in the coin’s history with classified advertisements promising to pay $50 for examples of this rarity.
Chicago Remembers
Of the July 11, 1934, CCC meeting, at which CCC members reminisced about the coin’ss earlier exhibit, the August 1934 issue of the American Numismatic Association’s journal, The Numismatist, recorded on pp. 522-523:
“CHICAGO COIN CLUB–185th meeting of the Chicago Coin Club, July 11. Sixty-three members and guests were present. The meeting was called to order by President Ripstra.
“Correspondence was read relative to the new Maryland half dollar and the proposed new Arkansas and Texas coins.
“Thomas Shugrue, Miss Elsie Borcherdt, Wa lter C. Scholl and H.J.
