JULY 17
1841•Castine Coin Hoard Reaches the Newspapers
1992•White House 200th Anniversary Silver Dollar
2007•American Eagle Platinum
The Castine Coin Hoard Reaches the Newspapers
On July 17, 1841, the Boston Daily Advertiser published an account—reprinted from Maine's Belfast Signal—of a remarkable cache of old silver coins found near Castine, Maine. The discovery itself had occurred earlier and continued to yield coins into 1841, so July 17 is best understood as the hoard's documented newspaper-publication milestone rather than its discovery date. Found near Johnson's Point on the Bagaduce River, the deposit contained a striking mixture of French, Spanish and Spanish-American, English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Massachusetts silver. Contemporary and later accounts suggest hundreds, perhaps nearly 2,000 pieces were recovered. Most were dispersed or melted, but enough survived to make the Castine Deposit one of the most important colonial-era coin hoards found in North America.
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A Newspaper Date, Not a Discovery Date
July 17 requires an important historical distinction.
The Castine Hoard was not first dug from the ground on July 17, 1841.
The exact day of its initial discovery has not been preserved with enough certainty to assign it honestly to a modern day-by-day calendar.
Instead, July 17 marks a documented moment when news of the discovery entered the broader newspaper record.
Research preserved by the Newman Numismatic Portal notes that an article concerning the coins appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser on July 17, 1841, reprinted from the Belfast Signal.
For this calendar, that publication date provides the firm historical anchor.
The coins were found near Castine on the coast of Maine, at Johnson's Point along the Bagaduce River.
The landscape was already saturated with colonial history.
Castine occupies a strategically important position near Penobscot Bay and had been contested by Indigenous peoples, French colonists, English colonists, Dutch forces, and later Americans.
Trading posts, forts, military expeditions, and shifting imperial boundaries repeatedly transformed the area.
Finding a mixed seventeenth-century silver hoard there was therefore not merely plausible—it fit the extraordinary international history of the place.
Captain Stephen Grindle and the Cache
Later numismatic research identifies the discoverer as Captain Stephen Grindle, who owned the land.
The deposit lay near a large rock close to the shoreline.
Coins were found concentrated around the rock, while additional pieces were scattered through the surrounding soil.
A nineteenth-century historical account described smaller coins extending down the slope, possibly displaced over time by water and erosion.
No durable container was found.
The original cache may have been wrapped or stored in something perishable that disappeared during more than a century underground.
The recovery was not a single dramatic moment in which one intact chest was lifted from the earth.
People continued digging around the site.
Dr. Joseph L. Stevens of Castine visited in early April 1841 while Grindle was still searching.
Stevens saw coins being dug and was later able to examine the collection before much of it had been dispersed.
He selected representative specimens for preservation.
That decision became crucial, because the majority of the hoard did not survive intact.
No precise inventory of every recovered coin exists.
Contemporary reporting described approximately $500 in silver as having been found.
Later local history estimated that there may have been nearly 2,000 individual pieces, though many were small fractional denominations.
Modern accounts therefore vary substantially in their estimates.
The safest conclusion is that the deposit contained hundreds of coins and may have approached roughly two thousand pieces.
The absence of a complete contemporary count is part of the mystery rather than a reason to force an artificial number.
The most fascinating feature of the Castine Hoard is its international composition.
This was not a bag of one country's coins.
The deposit contained silver from several European powers and their colonial systems.
French issues were especially numerous.
Spanish and Spanish-American silver appeared as well, along with English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Massachusetts coins.
In modern terms, that may sound chaotic.
In seventeenth-century North America, it was normal.
Before the United States existed, the colonies suffered chronic shortages of official coin.
Commerce could not simply stop because English sterling coins were scarce.
People used whatever reliable money was available.
Spanish silver circulated widely. French money moved through areas connected with New France. Dutch and Portuguese pieces could appear through Atlantic trade. Local colonial issues filled some gaps.
Coins were valued by metal, weight, reputation, and local law rather than by whether their designs matched the flag over a particular settlement.
The Castine Deposit is almost a textbook sample of that monetary world.
French Silver Dominated
French money formed the largest component of the hoard.
That is historically significant because Castine had deep connections with New France.
One newspaper account described a French silver coin bearing Louis XIV and the French crown, with a seventeenth-century date.
Later systematic study identified multiple French denominations and mints within the deposit.
The presence of so much French silver strongly reflects the region's commercial and political connections rather than an isolated collector's accumulation.
Spanish and Spanish-American silver also appeared in the hoard.
These coins were among the most important international currencies of the early modern world.
Silver from Spanish America flowed through trade networks reaching Europe, North America, and Asia.
Irregularly shaped cob coinage could look crude compared with later machine-made coins, but merchants cared about silver content more than perfect roundness.
Spanish dollars and their fractions became so familiar in North America that their influence survived into the monetary system of the later United States.
Among the most exciting pieces associated with the Castine Deposit were Massachusetts silver coins.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony began its own silver coinage in Boston in 1652 under mintmaster John Hull and his partner Robert Sanderson.
The famous series includes the NE, Willow Tree, Oak Tree, and Pine Tree types.
All carried the date 1652 even though production continued for years.
Several dozen Massachusetts tree coins have been reported from the Castine deposit in specialist research.
Their presence links the Maine cache directly with one of the earliest substantial coinages produced in English North America.
The persistent 1652 date has generated legends for generations.
One popular explanation claims Massachusetts kept using the old date to disguise continued minting from the English Crown.
The real political and legal history is more complicated, and modern researchers caution against treating the traditional story as the whole explanation.
What is certain is that the date became fixed on the series.
For historians trying to date a buried hoard, that means a Pine Tree shilling marked 1652 cannot by itself prove the deposit was buried in 1652.
Later-dated foreign coins are much more useful.
The Youngest Coin Sets the Earliest Possible Burial
Archaeologists and numismatists use a simple but powerful concept when dating coin hoards: the deposit cannot have been buried before its newest coin was made.
This is the terminus post quem—the earliest possible date after which an event could have occurred.
Specialist research on the Castine Deposit identified a French silver demi-écu dated 1690 from the Bordeaux Mint as establishing a key lower boundary for burial.
That means the hoard had to be concealed in 1690 or later.
Determining how much later is where historical detective work begins.
Early observers naturally connected the treasure with Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, the French military officer and trader whose name became attached to Castine.
Saint-Castin had lived among the Penobscot Abenaki and married into a prominent Indigenous family.
He operated in a frontier world where French, English, and Native political and commercial interests collided.
Because his residence and fortifications were attacked during the conflicts of the late seventeenth century, the idea that the coins represented money hidden during one of those crises was irresistible.
But an attractive story is not the same thing as proof.
Numismatist Sydney P. Noe devoted a major study to the cache in The Castine Deposit: An American Hoard, published by the American Numismatic Society in 1942.
Noe examined the surviving evidence and proposed a burial around 1704.
Later researchers have continued to examine the deposit's composition, chronology, and historical context.
The exact owner and precise burial circumstances remain uncertain.
That uncertainty is one of the hoard's attractions.
The coins provide evidence, but they do not identify the person who hid them.
Modern collectors intentionally assemble sets according to denomination, date, mint, condition, or design.
A seventeenth-century commercial hoard is different.
Its mixture can reveal what money actually moved through a region.
The Castine coins were probably not gathered because someone admired their varieties.
They represented wealth.
The owner cared that the pieces contained accepted silver and could be spent, exchanged, or weighed.
That makes the deposit an economic document as much as a numismatic one.
The Tragedy: Most of the Coins Were Melted
The fate of the hoard would horrify a modern numismatist.
According to the Maine Historical Society's later account, much of the money was paid to one of Grindle's creditors.
From there, most of it ultimately went into a silversmith's crucible.
Coins that today might be individually studied, cataloged, photographed, and preserved were valued largely as old silver.
Their historical information vanished when they were melted.
This is why the specimens deliberately saved by Stevens and others are so important.
Dr. Joseph L. Stevens examined the coins while the group was still relatively intact.
He selected some of the best examples of different varieties and paid for them at the value of old silver.
A later Maine Historical Society account described seventeen representative specimens in his preserved collection.
Other nineteenth-century accounts mention somewhat different selection totals, reflecting the imperfect documentation surrounding the find.
What matters most is that Stevens recognized the coins as historical objects before the bulk of the deposit disappeared.
The surviving Castine coins eventually entered institutional collections.
Maine Historical Society proceedings from 1881 record the presentation of a framed collection of silver coins found at Castine in 1841 by Dr. Stevens.
That institutional preservation changed the fate of those pieces.
Instead of being reduced to bullion, they became evidence available to historians and numismatists.
The difference between the melted coins and the preserved specimens is a lesson in why provenance matters.
Once the discovery entered newspapers, it traveled far beyond Maine.
Later in 1841, newspapers in other states reprinted accounts of “The Castine Coins.”
An October Georgia newspaper, for example, described the discovery and quoted correspondence from a visitor to the site.
The report said approximately $500 had been found and described coins scattered for 20 or 30 feet around the principal rock.
It also repeated speculation connecting the deposit with Baron Castine and the region's seventeenth-century conflicts.
The treasure had become national antiquarian news.
Why the July 17 Report Matters
The publication date matters because newspapers can provide a fixed chronological point when the physical event itself is poorly dated.
We know people were searching the site before July.
We know Stevens visited in April.
But we do not have a trustworthy day-and-month for the first coin pulled from the ground.
The July 17 Boston Daily Advertiser report is different: it has a definite publication date.
Using that date preserves the story without inventing precision the historical record does not contain.
The hoard makes more sense when Castine's geography is understood.
The settlement sits at the edge of Penobscot Bay, connected to waterways that functioned as transportation corridors long before modern roads.
The region linked coastal trade with interior Indigenous networks.
European powers recognized its strategic value.
French, English, Dutch, and later American forces all contested the area at different times.
A mixed silver cache buried there is therefore a material record of an international frontier.
A lone French coin found in Maine might have arrived through countless circumstances.
A lone Spanish coin would not be surprising because Spanish silver circulated almost everywhere.
A lone Massachusetts shilling would show regional movement.
But a deposit containing all of those categories together is far more informative.
The relationships between the coins matter.
The hoard demonstrates that multiple monetary systems could coexist in one person's accumulated wealth.
That is why archaeologists and numismatists fight to preserve hoards intact whenever possible today.
The Castine Deposit predates the United States dollar, the federal Mint, and even the political idea of the United States itself.
Yet it helps explain why later Americans cared so much about creating a stable national coinage.
Colonial commerce had operated with a confusing mixture of foreign coins, local issues, commodity money, paper currency, and book credit.
When Congress eventually created a federal monetary system, it was responding to generations of monetary fragmentation.
The Castine coins preserve that earlier world in physical form.
On July 17, 1992, the United States Mint released the White House 200th Anniversary Silver Dollar.
The commemorative marked two centuries since the laying of the White House cornerstone.
Its obverse depicts the north portico of the White House, while the reverse honors architect James Hoban and shows the main entrance he designed.
The program was authorized by Public Law 102-281.
The Mint ultimately recorded sales of 499,654 coins: 375,851 Proofs and 123,803 Uncirculated pieces.
A Fast Sellout
The Mint's 1992 annual report states that sales began July 17 and that the program achieved a complete sellout by August 13.
The commemorative generated surcharges for the White House Endowment Fund, supporting preservation of the White House collection of fine art and historic furnishings and maintenance of the historic public rooms.
It is a very different kind of numismatic history from the Castine Hoard: one is an accidental survival from colonial commerce, the other a deliberately created federal commemorative.
July 17 also marks a modern bullion-coin release.
At noon Eastern Time on July 17, 2007, the United States Mint opened sales of that year's American Eagle Platinum Proof and Uncirculated coins.
The Proof reverse featured the second design in the three-year “Foundations of American Democracy” series, this time celebrating the Executive Branch.
Thomas Cleveland designed the reverse, and Phebe Hemphill sculpted it.
The image shows a bald eagle with wings spread, paired with a shield symbolizing enforcement of the laws that protect American freedoms.
The Castine Hoard is not important because someone found buried money and became richer.
Its real value is historical.
The coins preserve evidence of the Atlantic economy that existed before the United States had its own national coinage.
French silver, Spanish and Spanish-American money, Massachusetts tree coins, and other European issues had accumulated together near a strategic Maine settlement where cultures and empires repeatedly met.
Most of the hoard was lost to the melting pot.
A small number of people recognized that some pieces were worth more as evidence than as silver.
On July 17, 1841, the Boston Daily Advertiser helped carry news of the discovery beyond the Maine coast.
That documented newspaper appearance gives us a precise date for a treasure whose actual day of discovery has been lost.
Sometimes numismatic history is not about when a coin was struck.
Sometimes it is about the day an old group of coins began telling its story again.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
1992 — White House 200th Anniversary Silver Dollar — White House 200th Anniversary commemorative dollar went on sale.
2007 — American Eagle Platinum — 2007 platinum proof/uncirculated coins released with Executive Branch reverse.