Lavere Redfield's Collection

Man Who "Loved Silver Dollars" 

and

"The Secret Silver dollar coin Hoard"

An interesting fellow

 Some say Lavere Redfield was an eccentric investor.  Others say he was a shrewd stock and real estate investor.  Still others said he was an average guy who had a distrust of big government and bought a lot of silver dollars, an awful lot of silver dollars!  Perhaps all of them are right.

     Lavere Redfield was born at the turn of the century.  He died in 1974 leaving behind an estate worth over 100 million dollars and one of the largest silver dollar hoards ever discovered, now called the “Redfield Hoard”. 

He was said to be very thrifty and appeared so, wearing jeans and wool shirts even after he became rich.  Surely influencing him was his early life as a potato farmer.  In his senior years he drove around in an old dilapidated pickup truck. If you had seen him then, you would have thought he was still digging potatoes.

Some called him the “junkman”

   By scrimping and saving he was able to save a little. He began making investments, over time bringing him great wealth.  During the depression he moved to California.  There he began buying stocks that no one else wanted.  Stock brokers used to love to see him coming because they would unload blocks of supposedly worthless stocks on him.  Stocks that no one else wanted “at any price”.  Her earned the nick name "the junk man” from the local stock brokers.  Seems Redfield’s shrewdness and timing paid off. 

(“Buy when no one else wants it and the price will be low.”) 

  They also say he gradually began acquiring other assets and real estate at tax foreclosure sales.

Silver Dollars - Where did they all come from?

  As he began to amass wealth he moved to Reno Nevada (the heart of silver country).  He started to acquire farm land and bought a good size stone house. Here his passion for accumulating silver dollars matured.  From time to time he would go to the bank and buy some bags of 1,000 silver dollars.  (Back then US silver dollars could be acquired for a dollar and were readily available at banks.)  He’d haul them home in his pickup truck and stash them away.  Seems word started spreading about his love for silver dollars and he was robbed more than once.  Probably because of the robberies he began acquiring his bags from as far away as Pennsylvania, picking them up in person and hauling them back in his pickup. 

The Secret Hoard in the Basement

  He also began storing the bags in his basement.  They say he would come home with a load of silver dollar bags and drop them down an old coal chute.  Sliding down into the basement they’d go, where they remained safely hidden behind a concrete wall until his death.  Most of the bags were mint condition un-circulated coins.  However, some were heavily marked from banging against each other as they were hauled in his pickup, or from handled at the mint or banks. 

The LaVere Redfield Collection

The bank vault couldn’t hold all the silver bags.

  Some say Redfield didn’t trust banks and his distrust lead him to store the silver dollar coins in his home. However, when you think about the space these silver dollars would have taken and the massive weight all it of, where else could he put them? He would have needed the equivalent of several personal bank vaults to store it all!   His stash of over 400,000 silver dollars would weigh 22 thousand pounds!

Where are they now?  What happened to his silver dollars?

Read the rest of the Redfield silver dollar story - click here. 

Buying Silver dollars today:

             -  Morgan and Peace style dollars -  click here

                           PCGS and NCG authenticated -   click here

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