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V4 2001 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 4, Number 46, November 11, 2001, Article 3 CENTRAL AMERICA BAR SETS PRICE RECORD From an Associated Press article filed the evening of November 8th: NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. (AP)-- The largest known gold bar from the California Gold Rush -- a bread loaf-sized brick named Eureka -- has been sold for a record $8 million, officials said Thursday. The ingot was bought by a collector described only as a "Forbes 400 business executive,'' said Michael Carabini, president of Monaco Financial, the Orange County-based rare coin company that handled the sale. The sale nearly doubled the record set previously for the sale of collectible money. In 1999, a single silver dollar sold for more than $4 million, said Donn Pearlman of the Professional Numismatists Guild. "They sold the artifact that was THE piece of numismatic history of the California Gold Rush,'' he said. The bar was handmade in 1857 by California assayers John Kellogg and Augustus Humbert. Weighing nearly 80 pounds troy, the bar was stamped with its 1857 value -- $17,433.57. On Sept. 3, 1857, the bar was loaded onto the SS Central America in San Francisco. The "Ship of Gold'' was bound for New York where the gold was to be turned into coins. Eight days later, the ship was damaged in a hurricane and sank Sept. 12 more than 140 miles east of Cape Hatteras, N.C., in 8,000 feet of water. More than 400 people died. The lost riches helped spark an economic depression that lasted three years." [You'd be depressed too, if you lost that much gold. Actually, the bar was loaded onto a different ship for the Pacific leg of the trip from San Francisco. It traveled across the ithsmus of Panama by train before being loaded onto the S.S. Central America on the Atlantic side. And if the gold were destined to be turned into coins, that would have happened in Philadelphia, not New York, which had no mint. The popular press could use a numismatic fact-checker. -Editor] See the San Francisco Chronicle article about the ingot:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/01/12/MN177895.DTL

Wayne Homren, Editor

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