FEBRUARY 16
1935•Baltimore Teenagers Win Cellar Gold Case
2021•2021 Native American $1 Coin
Two Baltimore Teenagers Win the Fight for a Cellar Full of Gold Coins
On February 16, 1935, newspapers reported that a Baltimore judge had awarded one of America's most remarkable buried coin hoards to the two teenagers who found it. Theodore Jones, 16, and Henry Grob, 15, had uncovered 3,558 United States gold coins in copper containers beneath a cellar floor. Their Depression-era treasure included gold dollars, quarter eagles, half eagles, eagles and double eagles dating largely from the nineteenth century. The discovery triggered competing ownership claims, federal gold-law complications, a famous 1935 auction—and, incredibly, a second hidden hoard.
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It sounds like the beginning of a children's adventure story.
Two boys.
A dirt cellar.
A shovel.
And a buried pot of gold.
But the Baltimore Gold Hoard was real.
And finding the treasure turned out to be the easy part.
Baltimore in the Great Depression
The story unfolded in 1934, when the United States was still struggling through the Great Depression.
Theodore Jones and Henry Grob were teenagers from families of modest means.
Jones lived at a Baltimore tenement on South Eden Street.
The boys spent time in the building's cellar and formed a small club.
They wanted a place to hide their club dues.
So they began digging.
What they found was worth vastly more than anything their club could have collected.
On August 31, 1934, Jones and Grob were digging in the dirt cellar when they struck a buried object.
They uncovered containers holding United States gold coins.
The first hoard totaled 3,558 coins.
They were not modern pocket change.
They were nineteenth-century American gold.
The find instantly transformed two teenagers into the center of a legal, numismatic and newspaper sensation.
What Was in the Hoard?
Accounts of the first discovery identify five major gold denominations:
$1 gold dollars
$2.50 quarter eagles
$5 half eagles
$10 eagles
$20 double eagles
The hoard contained coins dating largely from the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s.
A widely reported breakdown lists:
2,840 gold dollars
65 quarter eagles
255 half eagles
81 eagles
317 double eagles
The face value was more than $11,000.
But the collector value could be considerably higher.
The most numerous coins were the tiny one-dollar gold pieces.
The United States had introduced the gold dollar in 1849 during the California Gold Rush era.
These coins are physically among the smallest federal coins ever produced.
Finding 2,840 of them together was extraordinary.
The group reportedly included multiple gold-dollar types, creating a remarkable snapshot of mid-nineteenth-century American gold coinage.
The hoard also included hundreds of $20 Liberty Head double eagles.
The double eagle had been authorized after the California Gold Rush and first issued for circulation in 1850.
Each coin represented a substantial amount of money in the nineteenth century.
Three hundred seventeen of them alone represented $6,340 in face value.
Buried together beneath a Baltimore building, they raised an obvious question:
Who put them there?
No definitive answer emerged.
The coins appeared to have been hidden decades earlier.
Various theories circulated about former residents and possible owners.
As news of the discovery spread, claimants came forward.
Some argued that the treasure belonged to them or to relatives.
The property owners also had an obvious interest.
The boys had found the coins beneath land they did not own.
The fairy-tale treasure hunt became a property-law dispute.
Buried treasure raises difficult legal questions.
Does it belong to the person who finds it?
The owner of the building?
The person who originally concealed it?
The original owner's heirs?
Or the government?
The Baltimore hoard attracted numerous competing claims.
Judge Eugene O'Dunne eventually had to decide which claims were legally persuasive.
Gold Ownership Made Everything More Complicated
The timing could hardly have been worse for anyone finding thousands of gold coins.
In 1933 and 1934, the federal government dramatically restricted private monetary gold ownership as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to the banking and monetary crisis.
The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 further centralized monetary gold under federal control.
There were exemptions, including for certain coins of recognized collector value, but a massive newly discovered hoard could not simply be treated like ordinary cash.
The boys turned the coins over to authorities while ownership and disposition were resolved.
The contrast was extraordinary.
Two teenagers from struggling families had found thousands of gold coins during one of the worst economic crises in American history.
Yet they could not simply carry the treasure home.
They had to wait while lawyers, claimants, courts and government rules determined what would happen.
In a decade defined by unemployment and relief lines, a literal buried fortune sat beyond the finders' immediate reach.
In February 1935, Judge Eugene O'Dunne rejected the competing claims and ruled in favor of Jones and Grob.
A contemporary illustrated-news account summarized the result with the familiar phrase “finders are keepers.”
The Cumberland Evening Times reported the award on February 16, 1935.
The ruling made the boys the successful claimants to the first hoard.
But the story was not over.
Contemporary reports sometimes described the treasure as worth roughly $27,000 or more.
That figure should not be confused with the coins' face value.
A numismatic hoard can have several different “values” at once:
Face value.
Gold bullion value.
Estimated collector value.
And actual auction realization.
The distinction became important when the coins were sold.
Because of the legal and federal-gold complications, the hoard could not simply be handed back as thousands of gold pieces for unrestricted private possession.
The coins were prepared for public auction.
This transformed the discovery from a Baltimore curiosity into a national numismatic event.
Collectors would have the opportunity to buy coins that had spent decades hidden beneath a cellar.
May 2, 1935: The Famous Auction
The first Baltimore hoard was auctioned on May 2, 1935 at the Lord Baltimore Hotel.
Baltimore coin dealer Harry W. Fuller conducted the sale.
The collection was divided into hundreds of lots.
Collectors bid not merely for gold but for coins with an extraordinary provenance.
Modern accounts place the total auction realization at $19,558.75.
The boys reportedly attended and watched from the back of the room.
Among the most notable pieces was an 1856-O Liberty Head double eagle from the New Orleans Mint.
Today the 1856-O is recognized as one of the great rarities of the Liberty Head double eagle series.
At the 1935 auction, the Baltimore example reportedly sold for $105.
That price sounds astonishingly low to a modern collector, but the rare-coin market of 1935 was very different from today's.
The sale provides a fascinating benchmark for how American numismatic values have evolved.
The presence of scarce New Orleans pieces made the find particularly important.
The New Orleans Mint struck gold coins intermittently before the Civil War.
Many surviving issues are scarce or rare today.
The Baltimore hoard brought coins into the market that had apparently been removed from circulation generations earlier.
Hoard discoveries can therefore alter the known population of specific dates and mintmarks.
A coin from a famous hoard carries two histories.
The first is the history of the coin itself—its date, mint, denomination and design.
The second is the history of its discovery.
A Baltimore Hoard coin is not merely an 1850s gold piece.
It is a coin that was hidden beneath a Baltimore cellar, found by two teenagers during the Depression and sold through one of the era's most famous treasure auctions.
That provenance can matter to collectors even when the same date exists without it.
Then the Boys Went Back to the Cellar
Most treasure stories would end after the auction.
This one became stranger.
Jones and Grob returned to the cellar and dug again.
In 1935 they found another cache of gold.
Modern accounts estimate the second discovery at roughly $10,000 in contemporary value.
After the legal ordeal surrounding the first find, the boys did not immediately announce the second one.
The second discovery was divided.
The boys turned their portions over to their mothers.
At least some of the gold was sold.
For a time, the existence of the second treasure remained hidden from public view.
Then a burglary exposed the secret.
In September 1935, the Jones residence was burglarized.
Reports said gold coins and cash were stolen from a trunk.
The theft brought the second hoard into the newspapers.
Once again, treasure produced trouble.
And once again, legal disputes followed.
The February 1935 ruling was a major victory for Jones and Grob, but it was not the final word.
The first-hoard decision was appealed.
Litigation continued into 1937.
Ultimately, the boys' rights to the proceeds were upheld.
Accounts state that each was entitled to roughly $10,000 before legal costs and fees, with about $7,000 remaining to each afterward.
The funds were to be held until they reached adulthood.
The story ended tragically for Henry Grob.
He died of pneumonia in August 1937 at only eighteen years old.
He had been working in a packing house while litigation over the treasure was still continuing.
He never lived to enjoy the long-term benefit of the fortune he had helped discover.
The detail turns what might otherwise seem like a cheerful treasure story into something far more complicated.
What Happened to the Coins?
After the 1935 auction, the first hoard dispersed into collections.
Individual pieces have surfaced over the decades with Baltimore Hoard provenance.
Some have been certified by modern grading services.
Others may have lost their documented connection to the find as they changed hands.
This is common with old hoards.
Unless labels, auction records or ownership histories remain attached to a coin, provenance can disappear.
Collectors place value on pedigrees because they connect objects to documented history.
A famous collection can add interest.
A shipwreck can add interest.
A bank vault, frontier cache or buried treasure can do the same.
The Baltimore coins possess one of the most vivid pedigrees in American numismatics.
They were literally dug from the ground by children during the Great Depression.
The dates represented in the cache also matter historically.
Many coins had been struck before the Civil War.
Some were produced during the California Gold Rush era.
Some came from branch mints.
By being buried and forgotten, they escaped later melting, export, circulation wear and federal gold surrender.
The cellar inadvertently became a time capsule.
No explanation has been proven.
People buried money for many reasons in the nineteenth century.
Banks failed.
Wars created uncertainty.
Paper currency could be distrusted.
Gold was compact, portable wealth.
A property owner might hide it for security and then die, move away or lose the location.
Without documentation identifying the person who buried the Baltimore coins, any specific story remains speculation.
The timing of the discovery gives the story unusual monetary significance.
If the same coins had been found a few years earlier, the legal environment would have been different.
Instead, the treasure surfaced immediately after the federal government had transformed the nation's relationship with monetary gold.
The boys found nineteenth-century private wealth at the exact moment twentieth-century federal policy was restricting private monetary gold ownership.
The collision between those two eras helped shape everything that followed.
A Courtroom Version of “Finders Keepers”
The phrase “finders keepers” is usually children's language.
In Baltimore it became a newspaper shorthand for a genuine judicial decision.
But the case also shows why the phrase is legally incomplete.
Finding property does not automatically guarantee ownership.
Location, property rights, abandonment, prior ownership and applicable law can all matter.
Jones and Grob prevailed only after competing claims were examined and rejected.
Without the coins, the story might have faded into local folklore.
Numismatic records preserved it.
The 1935 auction catalog documented the material.
Newspapers documented the legal fight.
Later researchers reconstructed the story.
Leonard Augsburger's book Treasure in the Cellar: A Tale of Gold in Depression-Era Baltimore, published by the Maryland Historical Society, brought extensive research together for modern readers.
The Newman Numismatic Portal also preserves material relating to the hoard and its 1935 coverage.
The gold itself was discovered in August 1934.
The famous auction occurred in May 1935.
But February 16 marks the contemporary public reporting of the court victory that made the teenagers the successful claimants.
That legal decision is essential to the story.
Without it, the coins might have gone to a property owner, an alleged heir or another claimant.
The court's ruling determined who would benefit from one of America's greatest accidental coin discoveries.
The numbers alone are remarkable.
Three thousand five hundred fifty-eight gold coins.
Hundreds of double eagles.
Thousands of gold dollars.
Multiple nineteenth-century denominations.
A Depression-era court battle.
A public auction.
A second hidden hoard.
A burglary.
And years of appeals.
The Baltimore Gold Hoard contains almost every ingredient that makes numismatic history compelling.
On February 16, 1935, newspapers announced that Judge Eugene O'Dunne had ruled for teenage finders Theodore Jones and Henry Grob, awarding them the extraordinary cache of 3,558 United States gold coins they had dug from a Baltimore cellar the previous summer.
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