Last weeks featured Web page: CASTINE AND THE OLD COINS FOUND THERE as suggested by Ray Williams includes a numismatic mystery. In the E-Sylum photo one of the eighteen coins pictured is dated 1769. Yet the Castine Hoard, if associated with Baron Jean Vincent dAbbadie de St. Castin who departed for France circa 1703, must have closed much earlier than 1769 while he was still in America.

At the centennial of the hoards discovery, some of the original coins on loan from the Maine Historical Society were gathered by Sydney P. Noe, then Librarian of the ANS, and put on display in New York City. See Numismatic Notes and Monographs #100, The Castine Deposit: An American Hoard, American Numismatic Society, New York, 1942 for a detailed accounting of the coins with individual plates.

Q. David Bowers American Coin Treasures and Hoards, published by Bowers and Merena Galleries, 1997 gives a good sense of the paucity of early American coin hoards, so that understanding the Castine Hoard is key to knowing what coins circulated in the old Massachusetts Bay Colony which then included coastal Maine. Also see The Colonial NewsLetter #128 of August 2005, Second Thoughts on a First Rate Hoard: Castine Revisited.