The Great Kentucky Hoard

Hey, everybody, and welcome to Kentucky Life.

I'm your host, Chip Polston.

So for this show, we're going to be doing something a little different.

We're here at Mill Springs Battlefield National monument in Nancy, Kentucky.

The site of an important battle fought in the early days of the civil war.

Now this hallowed ground is going to be our backdrop as we tell you.

a single story in this episode.

But what a story it is?

It involves the discovery of a hidden treasure, speculation on how it ended up where it was found, the multi-million dollar payday it meant for one Kentucky farmer, and what else just might be out there waiting to be discovered.

You're going to hear about it from the two main people involved who have never spoken publicly about it until now.

The whole thing started in a farm field somewhere in Kentucky in early 2023.

♪ ♪ ♪ Freshly plowed fields.

Scenes like this are nothing new across the commonwealth as farmers will turn crops.

several times each year.

But on one particular day, in a location and on a date that have never been disclosed, something remarkable happened in a Kentucky field just like this one.

Now, as farmers often do, this particular man was out walking his field that he had just plowed when something caught his eye.

Now, what he saw looked out of the ordinary so he took his hands and he started to dig around.

Here now is actual video of what happened next.

As he dug, gold and silver coins began to spill out he dug more and more coins kept appearing.

In total, the farmer had stumbled upon what's now being called the Great Kentucky Hoard.

A literal treasure trove of more than 800 coins, including 1863 double eagles, silver coins, and hundreds of U.S. gold dollars dating back from 1850 to 1862.

One included an imprint from a burlap bag giving a clue as to how they were buried.

The face value of the coin's around $1,200.

In today's dollars, that's around $24,000.

They sold for more than $3 million.

Jeff Garrett runs Mid-America Rare Coin Galleries in Lexington.

He literally wrote the book on Civil War era gold coins.

Sits on the board of directors of the Smithsonian Museum of American History and has appeared on the popular TV show Pawn Stars about a half a dozen times.

As a result, he gets about 25 emails a day from people who think they may have valuable coins.

Now, 99% of those don't pan out.

But one day, Jeff got an email with a grainy photo of.

an 1863 gold double eagle.

coin, a very rare find.

The sender who is the farmer wanted to meet to talk just about this one coin.

And he has a little briefcase and then he pulls out, I can't remember how it started, but fairly quickly he showed me five coins, and I'm like and the condition of the coins were astounding.

They're really like mint condition So I was blown away and I was like, you know, tell me more, you know, what's.

What's the deal here?

Then it was like the big reveal.

"Okay, I found 800 gold coins in a cornfield.

And there are 18 of these 1863 20s."

So at that point, I'm like, you know, virtually, you know, shaking with excitement.

I'm like, this is, this is unbelievable.

So, the next step was to figure out exactly what was in the hoard.

The coins needed to be cleaned and preser.. That meant getting them to experts in Florida, which would entail getting on an airplane while carrying millions of dollars in rare coins.

Did the farmer travel with you?

Yes.

What do you talk about when you're sitting on an airplane with $3 million in coins.

with you?

We don't talk about anything.

It was, you know, he had a different seat.

We didn't, you know, we -- it was very low key.

Everything has to be, you know, when we -- everything.

for security, you're very low key when you do things like this.

How in the world can something that's been sitting in the ground for 150 years be in mint condition like that?

Gold, it's one of its beautiful aspects is that gold is not, it's impervious to corrosion and a gold coin can be buried for 2,000 years and you can bring it up and it'll look like the day it was made.

So gold is, it's one of its unique properties, it doesn't corrode.

So why would someone bury the cash equivalent of the yearly salary of nine.

soldiers in the civil war?

Amy Murell-Taylor is a historian at the University of Kentucky.

She says the banks of today bear no resemblance to banks looked like in the 1800s.

The civil war scrambles things and for people who were living during the civil war, they had actually already lived through two financial panics in the United States.

In 1837 and 1857, many banks failed.

So they had already gone through this tumultuous period and now here comes the civil war.

Add this mistrust of banks to what was going on in Kentucky at this point of the war.

And Murell-Taylor says, you can understand how such A treasure ended up in the ground Banks are being robbed.

They're very vulnerable to enemy forces.

So in Kentucky, in particular, we've got Confederate Raiders who are ripping through the state 1864, 1863, and banks for that reason too don't seem that reliable or safe.

So, and then you're afraid that maybe some of these enemy raiders are gonna come onto your property.

So you've gotta make sure it's somewhere that can't be seen, it can't be in an obvious place, inside the house.

So, yeah, put it in the ground.

And some feel there's still a lot of that treasure in the ground.

This is Bill Curd, Brian Cerniglia, and Larry Simmons, three friends who call themselves The Dirt Nerds.

Now you'll find them most weekends out searching for buried treasure and sharing their adventures on social media.

They've turned up some interesting items, cannonballs, belt buckles, and breastplates from the civil war, for example.

They say it satisfies their inner Indiana Jones and they have a knack for knowing where to look for potential treasure.

You know, whenever I go to an old house like this, I'm like, so where was the master bedroom?

You know, when this was owned and like try to picture, you know, where they would have been looking out so they could still see their cash, you know, it wasn't in the house, it was buried under a fence post or, you know, somewhere they knew, but they could still -- if they heard a noise in the middle of the night, they could get up quickly and look out the window, make sure nobody was there.

A metal detector dealer in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, told me his phone rang off the hook for days after the story of the Great Kentucky Hoard became known.

Now it's important to note, there is no established link between the hoard and the use of a metal detector.

But the technology definitely allows hunters like The Dirt Nerds to find interesting and potentially valuable items underground.

Can you tell what that is?

That is a pair of silver cufflinks.

Hey!

Silver cufflinks?

Ha-ha.

Now they're loose here.

It's almost like they're on a -- Yeah.

The cufflinks back then had two little chains.

That's it.

Right in the middle.

Wow.

So that's where we thought this story would end.

For reasons, I'm sure all of us can understand, most notably, he didn't want several hundred people with metal detectors and shovels tearing through his fields every weekend.

The identity of the farmer has never been disclosed, but we reached out to see if we could get his perspective.

And after months of a delicate back and forth, we have heard from him, and we'll bring you his insights in just a few minutes.

Now, as you can imagine, there is lots of speculation on just how those coins ended up in the ground.

Based on the dates on the coins, there's a school of thought that they may be possibly tied to a Confederate Civil War raider, John Hunt Morgan, originally from Lexington and now buried there.

Morgan conducted a series of raids into Kentucky with his most famous raid occurring in 1863.

Morgan started plundering riches in Tennessee, worked his way through Kentucky, and eventually ended up in Indiana and Ohio.

Here now is the story of what is known as Morgan's Great Raid and the man behind it.

John Hunt Morgan is most famous as a Confederate cavalry commander.

One of the most famous Confederate Kentuckians to come out of the civil war.

He comes from a long line of Lexingtonians and had deep involvement in the hemp industry before becoming a soldier.

And John Hunt Morgan is gonna grow up in a family that is relatively well off, has a number of enslaved individuals.

He'll have an opportunity to interact with horses.

He becomes an accomplished horseman.

He sees a family history filled with marshal military service that will drive him to have his own or desire his own career in the military after he is suspended and leaves Transylvanian University.

He seems to be very reluctant to break up the Union.

Kentuckians and even those who will become Confederates are very, very wary of tearing up the constitution and going off to form their own republic.

So they're, they're hoping that, you know, the slave states can work with the Lincoln administration.

Morgan and a lot of other Confederates come to believe that the Lincoln administration is being hostile in the spring of 1861 is where most Confederates and Morgan included say, now enough is enough.

And so they decide to try and get the state out of the union.

So Morgan himself will take his militia company and their weapons and go to Tennessee and join the Confederate forces there.

Morgan is gonna excel at these hit and run operations, right?

He doesn't have enough men to stand and fight.

And in fact, this is a thing that plagues the confederacy for the entire war, right?

They're largely outnumbered.

So Morgan is gonna lean into that, he's gonna become what Southerners will call the Francis Marion of the West, right?

This kind of heroic figure.

And this is where we start to see Morgan's celebrity in 1860, late 1861, and into early 1862 start to take off.

He leads these raids.

He gets union commanders in Kentucky and Tennessee concerned where is Morgan gonna go?

Morgan is convinced that Kentucky wants to succeed, that Kentucky is under the thumb of United States authorities, is under, you know, effectively the martial law of the United States that most Kentuckians deep down inside believe like he does that the destiny of Kentucky is with the South.

And so he hopes that he can recruit some of those disaffected Kentuckians and get them to join the Confederate army.

Morgan's most famous raid, the Great Raid or Morgan's Raid, is a raid that takes place in the summer of 1863.

It will have Morgan and his men touch on at least five different states.

Morgan himself is going to lead his men from Tennessee into Kentucky.

His whole plan is to re-establish his reputation of his men and himself as this heroic cavalier as someone who can do great things.

And again, leaning into his celebrity, knowing that he is a hero in the eyes of Southerners.

His goal is to deliver them a miracle.

Tebbs Bend is where Morgan is trying to cross the Green River.

And this kind of sets a pattern for what he's going to experience whenever he comes up against really high quality regular union soldiers.

They're able to hold off this river crossing and inflict pretty severe casualties on Morgan's force, including especially officer casualties, right?

So the leadership of these units that Morgan is trying to lead on this raid get really decimated at this first blow.

They're eventually able to force their way across the river.

But again, at what cost?

So after Tebbs Bend, Morgan will then go up to Lebanon, Kentucky, and face the same thing.

Unfortunately, for Morgan, there is a noticeable casualty in the battle.

His youngest brother, Tom Morgan is killed in that final assault on the 20th headquarters.

And this is where we begin to see Morgan start to lose control of his men and either he is intentionally not reining them in or he is unwilling, emotionally unable to rein them in.

In the past, Morgan has maintained strong discipline.

When his men raid, they steal from union soldiers, they steal union supplies, they don't target civilians.

And this changes in Lebanon, about 20 buildings in the town are gonna be burned.

The men are gonna go wild, looting, burning, and also forced marching for about nine miles.

The union prisoners that capture.

Well, you know, Morgan needs to keep moving out of the state.

You know, he's kind of kicked up a hornet's nest here in Kentucky and he knows that if he tries to attack any more of the major strategic points within Kentucky, he's going to face stiff resistance of proper United States soldiers.

And so, you know, he's looking for less resistance going north seems to be the easiest path forward with the idea that he could cross the river into Indiana and then move east trying to find another place where he could cross back into Kentucky or Virginia, cross the Ohio River, and get back south.

You know, his goal is to escape south by going north.

Morgan invades his place that is fully against him.

And even with political divisions between anti-war democrats, also known as Copperheads and Republicans in Indiana and Ohio, they still don't like John Hunt Morgan.

So Indiana and Ohio are gonna raise thousands of local home guards or militia units.

They will frustrate Morgan as he goes along.

Morgan tries to cross the Ohio River at a place called Buffington Island from Ohio to what is now West Virginia.

He would of course considered it Virginia.

By that time, the Union Navy is able to get some gun boats up to oppose that crossing.

And so a large number of his troops are captured there, Morgan himself and a handful of other troops are able to escape a little bit inland, but eventually they're bagged.

And what most of his enlisted men will go into prison camps, particularly Camp Douglas in Chicago.

But Morgan and his officers will end up being sent to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus.

Morgan is important to be remembered because he plays a such a point.

He is a folk legend that people rally to and they think about as this Gallant Cavalier.

That is the kind of nice patina, right, that goes around Morgan that he is this shiny figure and yet the actions that he takes increasingly damages supplies, harms Kentuckians.

It's destroying their railroads; it's looting their homes.

He's important to be remembered because he plays a vital part in the war.

So while Morgan is memorialized as this gentleman Southerner, this gentleman Cavalier, his actions are, are more complicated than that, that rely on violence, rely on robbery, rely on destruction to try, and bring fear and to disrupt union forces.

We shouldn't be focusing on the shiny aspects of Morgan's personality, we should be focusing on how he fights the war, which is increasingly he's unable to restrain his troops and it leads to a more destructive war in Kentucky.

♪ ♪ ♪ We're here today at Mill Springs Battlefield National Monument.

This is Andrew Miller with the National Park Service.

Andrew, thanks so much for being here with us today.

My pleasure.

So the significance of this place, we just saw the story about Morgan's Raiders.

Morgan's Raiders didn't come through here, but we're in Pulaski County.

There is a time back to Morgan Raiders from here in the county, correct?

Correct.

Yeah, many of the young men that were living in Pulaski and Wayne Counties had divided loyalties during the civil war and those that decided to align themselves with the confederacy, many of them joined the ranks of Morgan's Raiders and would go on and serve in the war with Morgan.

So, they actually were part of the group that went.. and did these raids?

Correct.

Wow.

So, the battle that was fought here though, tell me about what actually happened on the land where we're standing.

Yeah, this battle, the Battle of Mill Springs or Logan's Crossroads was fought on January 19, 1862.

So very early on in the American Civil War.

It was the clash of about 10,000 men, 5,000 on both sides.

They met on the fields that we are currently standing on.

The Union Army was brought to this location to drive the Confederates, which had crossed the Cumberland River and fortified themselves here.

And so their job was to push the Confederates back out of the state of Kentucky into Tennessee.

The Confederates stole a March on them on the morning of January 19th and the Union Army was surprised and attacked, but ultimately rebounded and won this battle.

And this was a bloody battle.

This was pretty rough.

In the scale of civil war battles, it's relatively small, it is brutal and bloody, but it's the decisiveness of this battle.

The Union Army does win and they do force the Confederate authorities out of the State of Kentucky, so.

And as I read, this was really the first big decisive battle, as you said, won by Union forces and really kind of changed the face of the war a little bit, didn't it?

Correct.

The Union armies had been unsuccessful up to this point.

And at this time in the war, this was a big deal.

There was a boost in northern morale and of course, the objective of pushing the Confederates out of the State of Kentucky.

This was the first big push for that.

Final question.

Why is it important to maintain sites like this that people can come out and actually walk where these things happen?

We are in the preservation business.

The National Park Service preserves the land to allow future generations to come and understand their history.

And so for a place like Mill Springs, it's incredibly important to understand these watershed moments in our nation's history.

Andrew Miller with the National Park Service, it really is an amazing place there.

Thanks so much for letting us be here today.

My pleasure.

So as we said, we thought we'd told just about everything there was to tell on this story.

Until after several months of back and forth, facilitated by Jeff Garrett, who you heard from earlier in our show, we found out that there might, might be a chance to hear from the farmer himself who discovered the Great Kentucky Hoard.

Now in the early days of this story, it seemed like everyone wanted to hear from him, but no one did, until now.

More than 700 rare gold Civil War era coins were found somewhere in the bluegrass.

The coins date back between 1850 and 1862.

It's being called the Great Kentucky Hoard.

When news of the Great Kentucky Hoard broke, it broke big.

The story received extensive media attention all across the country with everyone from the New York Times to the Washington Post to TV news networks covering it.

But throughout all of this, one question, a big question remained.

What can you tell us about the farmer who is the person that, that found this?

Well, that was one of the reasons the person came to me.

He wanted to, you know, get to know me, and talk about.

He wanted to do something, but he wanted to stay completely confidential about everything.

He didn't want people to, you know, bug him for any reason or also, you know, dig up his land and things like that.

So it's pretty much all, you know, that part's confidential and I'm just gonna remain that way.

But after a couple of months of back and forth, one day I opened up an email to find three pages of written responses to questions from the farmer who discovered the Great Kentucky Hoard.

These are the only insights anyone has heard from him and they are fascinating.

Here now is his story about how this all happened.

I was in the fields as any other normal day.

I started walking a portion of the property where I had seen broken pieces of pottery and brick, strewn in a fairly confined area when I came across the first coin, something that has happened a decent amount of times.

I found my first "old coin" when I was maybe nine, walking the fields around my hometown looking for arrowheads.

But this time, it was a little more exciting.

Little did I know what that would lead to next.

I asked, when you first looked down in the dirt and saw the coins, what was going through your mind?

Did you realize the enormity of what you had just found and that this was a life changing event?

I initially found the 1856 Seated Liberty half dollar, probably 20 to 30 feet from where the hoard was located.

I would have never believed what came next.

Things that only happen in dreams.

When I continued walking and saw the glint of gold, a thick reeded edge.

When I pulled the coin from the ground, I was astonished when I realized I was holding a $20 Double Eagle from the 1860s.

After I flipped the first clump of dirt, over the next 45 minutes to an hour, the coins kept coming.

I knew it was hundreds.

I initially guessed around 300 to maybe 400 coins.

To my surprise, when I got home and started counting, the total was over 800 coins, 770 of which were gold.

I asked, walk me through the days after the discovery, what were you thinking?

I knew right away that I had made an enormous discovery.

I hadn't heard of such a find in the US in ages.

I spent hours researching each coin and the different years and varieties to check for rarities and key dates.

After researching the key dates for the Double Eagle $20, I realized I had not one but 18 of one of the rare dates, the 1863 20s.

This is when my head began to spin and I knew I needed help.

Has this changed the way you walk around and look at things?

Surprisingly, not much.

As I said, I have spent many years wandering the fields and river banks looking for anything that catches the eye.

My father did it before me.

My great grandmother had one of the most incredible museum worthy collections of arrowheads, all found walking cultivated land and the banks of the rivers.

I guess maybe it's in my bones, I have always been extremely fascinated with discovering items from the past.

And finally, any advice you'd offer to treasure hunters or anyone else out there captivated by this story?

Keep your eyes out and never stop looking.

I never even imagined I would find one gold coin in my entire life, let alone something so significant.

It has its own hoard name.

There are hundreds of stories of lost treasure, hidden stashes from bandits and just the superstitious wealthy old guys who didn't trust the banks.

How those coins ended up in the ground is a story lost to the ages, but that doesn't mean there aren't lots of theories on why more than $3 million in gold coins were buried in a field somewhere in Kentucky.

So I think that the coins that were found are part of one of the four caches that are supposedly in Kentucky that John Hunt Morgan and his men buried when they were the Morgan traders during the civil war.

So I think this was a landowner somewhere in central western Kentucky.

Somebody who's sitting there in 1863, 1864, was suddenly alarmed by word, by rumor that Confederate Raiders were coming.

They're trying to figure out what to do with this.

It's too much to sew into their clothing, to hide.

And so they do the next best thing, which is to dig a hole and put it in the ground.

I think it was a farmer who was alive during the civil war, heard about soldiers coming through raiding, stealing, taking people's belongings.

Decided I'd rather put it out in the field and have it be safe than in my house and the possibility of getting robbed by soldiers.

I think it was buried in a hurry.

I think whoever buried it was being chased.

So I don't think they had time to bury it very deep.

How they got lost there is anyone's guess.

And it could have been, you know, person could have gotten killed, could have forgot they were there.

And you know, obviously, it was a lot of turmoil in Kentucky at the time.

We don't really -- we were on the forefront of the civil war, but there was certainly conflict.

And while we'll never know exactly how they ended up in the ground, many feel there's a lot more out there under the dirt, and some Kentucky fields just waiting to be discovered.

It inspires a little bit of hope that there's still stuff like that out there.

You know, you think every great treasure has been found and, you know, we chase targets all day and some days there's not a good one to be found, but it gives you that little bit of hope to keep searching, keep doing the research, keep putting the time in, and just keep going.

So what do you think?

How do you believe more than $3 million in gold coins from the 1800s ended up in the dirt in a field somewhere in Kentucky?

Well, we'd like to hear from you.

Join us on the Kentucky Life Facebook page and let us know how you think this may have happened.

And if you'd like to see the complete statement from the farmer who discovered the Great Kentucky Hoard, go to ket.org/kentuckylife.

Thanks so much for joining us for this special episode of our show.

We hope you've enjoyed this tale of the hidden treasure, intrigue and discovery.

And who knows what else might be out there just waiting to be found.

For now, I'll leave you with this moment.

I'm Chip Polston, cherishing this Kentucky life.

♪ ♪ ♪