1913 Liberty Proof

Five coins. That is the entire surviving population of the 1913 Liberty Head nickel, one of the most famous rarities in American numismatics and a coin that by any official measure should not exist at all. The Mint had officially replaced the Liberty Head design with James Earle Fraser's Buffalo nickel for 1913, and all 1913 nickels were supposed to carry the new design. The five Liberty Head coins dated 1913 are unauthorized productions, struck through a scheme that the United States Mint never formally acknowledged and whose exact details have been debated by numismatic researchers for more than a century.

The most widely accepted explanation centers on Samuel W. Brown, a Philadelphia Mint employee who worked at the facility from 1903 until November 1913. Brown likely struck the five coins surreptitiously in late 1912 or early 1913, anticipating that they would become valuable as the last examples of the Liberty Head design. He then waited several years before revealing their existence, possibly to avoid drawing attention while he was still a Mint employee. By late 1923, advertisements in The Numismatist began offering 1913 Liberty Head nickels for sale, and Brown's known association with the coins began to surface. By 1920 he had displayed the coins publicly. Wayte Raymond and dealer Stephen K. Nagy handled them subsequently, and by 1924 through 1926 the entire group had been acquired by Col. E.H.R. Green, the eccentric millionaire collector whose mother was Hetty Green, "the Witch of Wall Street." After Green's death, dealers Burdette G. Johnson and Eric P. Newman bought all five from the Green estate in December 1941 for $2,000 the lot, an acquisition that has become legendary in American numismatic history.

The five coins are now named and tracked by provenance. The Eliasberg specimen is graded PCGS PR66 and is the finest known; it set multiple auction records including the first United States coin to top one million dollars (Bowers and Merena, May 1996, $1,485,000) and eventually sold for $4,560,000 at Stack's Bowers in August 2018. The Olsen specimen is PCGS PR64, formerly owned by Dr. Jerry Buss (the Los Angeles Lakers owner) and famously featured in a 1973 episode of Hawaii Five-O; it sold for $3,737,500 at Heritage in January 2010 and again for $3,290,000 at Heritage in January 2014. The Norweb specimen was donated by the Norweb family to the Smithsonian Institution in 1977 and remains in the national collection. The McDermott-Bebee specimen resides at the American Numismatic Association Money Museum, donated by Aubrey and Adeline Bebee in 1989. The Walton specimen is PCGS PR63 and has its own remarkable story.

George Walton was killed in a car accident in 1962 while transporting his 1913 Liberty Head nickel to a numismatic convention. For forty years his coin was believed by his family to be a counterfeit, even though numismatic researchers continued to wonder where the fifth known specimen had gone. In 2003, after Bowers and Merena offered a $10,000 reward for an opportunity to view the specimen, Walton family members brought it to an ANA convention where a panel of experts authenticated it as genuine. The reward was paid, and the coin was subsequently certified by PCGS at PR63. It sold at Heritage in April 2013 for $3,172,500 to Jeff Garrett and Larry Lee.

The McDermott specimen has the most charming history of the five. J.V. McDermott owned the coin until 1967 and famously carried it as pocket change at coin shows, taking it out at convention bars to delight patrons who had never seen one and never would see another. The wear from this casual handling makes the McDermott coin the only circulated example of the five and gives it the lowest grade in the group. After McDermott's death the coin sold at Paramount International in 1967 to Aubrey and Adeline Bebee for $46,000, a price that seemed enormous at the time and that looks trivial next to modern auction records. The Bebees donated it to the ANA Money Museum in 1989.

For practical purposes, the 1913 Liberty Head nickel is a coin most collectors study from catalogs and auction records alone. The five known examples trade only in private transactions or through the rarest of public auction offerings, and ownership requires a level of financial commitment that is in the same category as the most expensive American art. Its inclusion in this catalog reflects its historical importance to American numismatics, though few collectors will ever add one to their personal holdings. The coin exists primarily as a story: of Samuel Brown's alleged scheme, of the five coins' journey through successive owners, of the Walton specimen's lost decades and dramatic rediscovery, of the McDermott coin's years as a pocket-show curiosity, and of the enduring fascination that surrounds unauthorized American coinage. The Liberty Head nickel series, which had begun in 1883 with the Racketeer Nickel scandal, closed in 1913 with five unauthorized coins whose existence was itself a kind of final scandal inside a Mint that had struck the series for thirty years.