MONTANA BAR FEATURES 80,000+ DOLLARS

You've probably seen the 50,000 Silver Dollar billboards on Interstate-90.

They're hard to miss.

The signs advertise what is certainly one of Montana's most extensive collections of silver dollars.

Located about 16-miles from the Idaho border, Lincoln's 50,000 Silver $, has long been a stop off for travelers, tourists and truckers.

 

NBC Montana met Brooke Lincoln, the owner/manager of the 50,000 Silver Dollar operation.

She ushered us into the bar, which has been in her family since the early 1950's.

There are few places in the country that feature such a magnitude of coins.

Brooke shows us how this collection began, on the bar top, where the first silver dollars were embedded.

In this massive display, she showed us her grandparents' dollar.

"The original coin was right there," she pointed, "put in by Gerry and Marie Lincoln ."

"The locals followed suit," said Brooke, "and that was the beginning."

Brooke's grandparents' original bar was in Alberton, about 60 miles east.

In 1952, punching silver dollars into the bar was a way for the Lincoln's to promote what was then called the 'Cherry Springs Bar.'

Back then, silver dollars were common Montana currency.

"You didn't get paid in paper dollars in Montana," said Brooke. " You got paid in silver dollars."

Unlike today, Brooke said there weren't a large number of tourists passing through.

It was before Interstate-90 made travel more accessible.

The Lincoln's 'Cherry Springs Bar,' catered to local patrons, mostly miners and lumberjacks.

Silver dollars were heavy, and on payday, working men's pants would be loaded down with coins.

Silver rode heavy in their pockets.

"Rumor has it," said Brooke, "that's why loggers wear suspenders, so they could get their paycheck home."

Donating a silver dollar with your name underneath became tradition.

"Oh, yeah," said Brooke, "they still belong to the people whose names are underneath them. They don't belong to me. The oldest one is an 1876 seated Liberty."

 

By 1953, the number of dollars at the bar grew so much the bar was named 'Lincoln's 2,000 Silver Dollar Bar.'

Three years later, the family moved the bar and the bar top to Haugan.

The bar's name kept changing.

There was the 6,000 Silver Dollar Bar, then the 8,000, the 10,000 and finally the 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar.

The bar top filled up.

That's when the family moved to the walls.

"We just started putting them in boards," said Brooke," filling them up and putting people's names underneath to hang on the wall."

"You see a heck of a lot of coins," she laughed, as she stood beneath the extraordinary display.

She said more than 10,000 coins are real silver dollars that were last minted in 1935.

All the antique dollars are Morgan or Peace dollars.

The rest are Eisenhower dollars that were minted in the 1970's.

Even though it's still called the 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar, the actual numbers have grown significantly since the last naming.

Displayed prominently on a board above the bar is the latest count-$81,947.

The family gathers new coins all the time.

But it's a big job preparing them for new backboards, so they're only installed once a year, in February.

All the walls in the bar have been covered.

That's impressive, because it's a big bar with high ceilings.

Brooke said you need binoculars to see the higher displays.

 

There are now so many coins they've started spilling onto the walls of the gift shop.

Brogan said people are always coming back to find the coin that relatives left.

"The funnest ones to look up are the ones in the bar top, " she said, "They're the oldest and there's always a great story behind how they got here."

Every coin has a story.

Brogan knows of one family that comes back again and again.

"They point it (the coin) out to their daughter," she said, " and it's one of the ways they connect to their grandfather."

 

Brooke showed us a wooden plaque above the bar with a slug encased in the middle.

"A bullet was removed from the one guy who tried to remove a silver dollar from this collection," she said, " and Grandma shot him."

He survived.

To read the complete article, see:
Coin numbers at 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar exceed 80,000 (https://nbcmontana.com/news/montana-moment/coin-numbers-at-50000-silver-bar-exceed-80000)

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