A rare $4 gold coin from the 19th century could get as much as $1.5 million at an auction. The rare coin was made in the 1880s and is described as one that comes around once in a decade.
The auction, which will be sold by Bonhams in Los Angeles in September 23, is part of a 27-piece coin set that could be worth as much as $8 million in total, reported the International Business Times.
“They’re the rarest of the rare. They are put together as a design type of the United States coinage from the gold dollar up to a $20 gold piece,” Paul Song, an expert on rare coins and banknotes at Bonhams, told the Times.
“That’s an average lot value of almost $300,000 per coin. That may not be a Monet painting but in my world, that’s pretty amazing. It’s been a privilege to handle them, and they are gorgeous, just because they’re gold, perfectly struck and the designs are really incredible,” he said.
He added, “Some of these, there are a few hundred pieces known to have been struck. A few of them, such as the 1880 Coiled Hair $4 piece, there’s only less than a dozen now. So even within that range, they range from being very rare to extremely rare are almost unique in that case. Their prices vary anywhere from $25,000 on the low end up to potentially $1.5 million for that 1880 $4 coin.”
He said the Coiled Hair piece “is one of the so-called white whales of the coin collecting world. They are so rare, they come on the market maybe once or twice, at most, every decade.”
Song said the $4 coin was created to match the weight of coins in countries of the Latin Monetary Union including France, Belgium, and Switzerland.
