Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 27, 1994 TAG: 9407150046
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A coin enthusiast, Jefferson founded the U.S. Mint and introduced the national coinage system we know today.
During his travels abroad as a statesman, Jefferson collected more than 300 coins, some of which he used as models for U.S. currency. His collection, now missing, included Roman coins dating to the reign of Caesar Augustus and coins from 18th-century Europe.
The U.S. Mint, in cooperation with the American Numismatic (coin-collecting) Association and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, has mounted a national search for the lost coins. But the trail is almost 30 years cold.
Jefferson donated his collection in 1805 and 1806 to the American Philosophical Society, a Philadelphia-based organization founded by Benjamin Franklin. The society put the coins with other donated collections and eventually forgot that Jefferson once owned them.
More than 150 years later, in 1967, the society cleaned out its archives and sold all its coins - including the Jefferson collection - to Seymour Moss, a Philadelphia-based antiques dealer, for $1,650.
Moss, who probably was not aware of the coins' significance, died a few years later and may have taken the secret of their whereabouts to his grave.
"From what we've heard . . . [Moss] didn't do a lot of record-keeping," said Debbie Andrews, who is acting as a liaison for the three groups searching for the coins. Andrews is an account supervisor with the RTC Group, an independent agency contracted by the Mint to handle the marketing of the Thomas Jefferson commemorative coins.
Andrews said that some people who knew Moss have called to offer suggestions, but none knew of any coins sold by Moss that were similar to Jefferson's.
If some of the coins can be found, the groups hope to obtain them on loan for display at Monticello.
"We're hoping that somebody will come forward with whatever information they have, so we can find some semblance of the collection that passed through Jefferson's hands," she said.
Robert W. Hoge, curator of the American Numismatic Association, said his organization would attempt to identify possible coins from Jefferson's collection by matching the coins to descriptions from the American Philosophical Society's records. But without documentation such as a bill of sale from Moss, the association could not prove the coins were Jefferson's.
Also adding to the search's difficulty, he said, is the fact that most of Jefferson's coins probably don't have a high market value and may have been traded many times in recent years.
"This is more of a hope than an active search" now, Hoge said. He asks that anyone with information about Moss or the coins call the U.S. Mint in Washington, D.C.
by CNB