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The 1913 Liberty Head five-cent piece is one of the rarest coins in the world. The search and intrigue over the nickel—one of just five left—has strong Roanoke connections.
The collector met his death half an hour after sunset as he drove through Middlesex, North Carolina, on roads still rain-slicked from remnants of the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962.
The collector was headed east to a coin show in his 1956 Ford station wagon. His coin collection rode with him. Valued then at $250,000, it included a 1913 Liberty Head Nickel—one of the rarest coins in the world and valued at $65,000.
On a slightly curved section of Highway 264, a car heading the other way occupied by a pair of 30-something local women smashed head on into the collector’s car, killing him instantly.
Police identified George Walton from news clippings found in the station wagon. According to the account that ran in the Roanoke Times, Walton’s coin collection “was reported to have been scattered along the road” in the crash. Walton’s 1913 Liberty Head Nickel was recovered; it was near impossible to miss, stored in a clear plastic case with a label.
However, when Walton’s coins were sent to New York auction house Stack’s Bowers Galleries to be put up for auction, Stack’s experts ruled that his Liberty Head Nickel was a fake. Rumor held that Walton often carried a fake version of the nickel for security, but a search of his collections in bank vaults and storage sites in Charlotte, North Carolina, Jacksonville, Florida, and Roanoke, Virginia, failed to turn up the authentic version.
News reports of Walton’s death claimed he lived in Charlotte, but Roanoke papers claimed him as the Star City’s, and indeed he was buried here, in a service by Oakey’s.
In the months and years that followed his death, Walton’s extensive collections—not just of coins, but firearms, swords, canes, stamps, historic documents and more—flowed out from the places they’d been stored. He didn’t have much money, but his collections were so voluminous as to resemble a hoarder, except that everything was chosen with a keen eye for novelty and value.
Much of Walton’s collection was stored in Roanoke, where he had family. He owned a house on Campbell Avenue SW that was used almost exclusively for storing his firearm, sword and cane collections. He didn’t live there, lodging instead at the Ponce de Leon Hotel or with family while in town, but he did employ a caretaker who kept an eye on the place.
The auctions that followed Walton’s death boggle the mind. In addition to the primary coin auction, a second was held just for the numerous duplicates in his collection. The sale of his coin collection—just a year after its value was estimated at $250,000—fetched $874,836.75, a world record at the time, worth about $6 million today.
The firearm/sword/cane auction in Roanoke featured hundreds of items that had been stored in the Campbell Avenue house, including items with features such as hidden flasks and daggers. A flier advertised “One of the nation’s largest collections of antique firearms, ammunition and swords to be sold at auction to settle the estate of the late George O. Walton,” then listed the items to be sold: 1,400 hand guns; 350 rifles; 100,000 rounds of collection ammunition; 500 swords; 100 canes, mostly with hidden guns, swords, daggers or flasks; and “other books, music boxes, bric-a-brac, and some china and glassware.”
One bidder, Paul Selley, bought a .45 Colt revolver for $100 that later was confirmed as having been Western legend Bat Masterson’s personal handgun, valued in 1964 at more than $10,000.
Prices realized at public auction for his various other collections included $25,404.60 for stamps; $7,914 for modern jewelry and watches; $4,150 for antique jewelry and watches; and $3,096 for books, almanacs, newspapers, tintypes, fans and historical documents.
Still, the 1913 Liberty Nickel carried a fame that outstripped the rest of Walton’s collection. The Stack’s declaration that Walton’s coin was a fake not only cast a shadow on his reputation but created an enduring mystery: Where was the fifth 1913 Liberty Nickel?
The Nickel
The allure of the five 1913 Liberty Nickels grew not only from their scarcity, but also from their murky origins. In 1913, the long-running Liberty Head design was replaced by the Buffalo Nickel. No one knows who made the 1913 Liberty Nickels, which featured the old design with the new year, but many believe rogue employees at the Philadelphia Mint surreptitiously made the coins.
The five 1913 Liberty Nickels made their public debut in 1920 when collector Samuel Brown displayed them at the American Numismatic Association’s convention. The coins passed through various hands but remained together until 1936, when they were broken up and sold to different owners. Collector Louis Eliasberg—famous as the only man to ever have assembled the only complete collection of U.S. coins—owned one, as did King Farouk I of Egypt.
“The coin is arguably the most famous in United States history because of the speculation about why they were made, the promotion of the coin during the Great Depression when a Texas dealer had newspaper and radio advertising that he would pay $50 for a 1913 Liberty Head Nickel, and the very fact that a small denomination coin could be worth so much money,” says publicist Donn Pearlman.
Walton’s death and the subsequent declaration of his coin as fake threw the coin world into contortions. Collectors with metal detectors walked the stretch of highway where the crash occurred, combing the ground in hopes of finding the coin. Others scrutinized statements Walton had made in interviews prior to his death, trying to read between the lines as to whether he owned it, or perhaps had access to it, or had just seen it, or maybe never had the real thing at all but only the fake.
More than one party offered a high-dollar reward for it, motivated partly by hopes it might materialize but just as much by the publicity and resulting opportunity to buy other, unrelated coins.
That’s part of what motivated publicist Donn Pearlman and Bowers and Merena auction house to offer a $1 million reward for the missing 1913 Liberty Nickel. Like those before it, this reward was intended largely as a publicity stunt. It worked: The Associated Press ran a story that was printed in newspapers around the world.
And that’s how the story wound its way into my hands as a hungry first-year news clerk at The Roanoke Times.
Assignment
Dwayne Yancey—then a metro editor, now editor of the editorial page—slapped it down on my desk, along with a tip from Harold Bowman, a Roanoker who’d called to say that he knew George Walton from his days living in the Ponce de Leon Hotel.
“This could be a wild-goose chase, or it could deliver a really good story,” Yancey said. He asked me to find out whatever I could about Walton and the nickel. Belinda Harris, who oversaw the paper’s library of archives, delivered a small stack of stories about Walton, and I interviewed Bowman. A picture began to emerge of a dapper-dressed man with a combover who traveled throughout the southeastern U.S., wheeling and dealing. Harris turned up contact information for Walton’s remaining relatives, of whom there were few. I spoke to Walton’s sister-in-law Lucille, who told me her late husband had inherited some of Walton’s coin collection but that it had been burglarized some years before. Most trails dead-ended at an obituary or disconnected phone line, but I continued to dig.
I visited the Towers Mall coin shop and spoke with its owner, who told me he thought Walton was a fraud and never owned the Nickel. I interviewed Beth Deisher, then-editor at Coin World, who talked about the history of the coins and speculated on what might have happened. I concluded the story with Deisher speculating about different possible fates for the coin, including that it might have fallen into general circulation and could thus be anywhere. As a writer, I wanted readers to finish my story, then start fishing in their pockets to look at their coins.
When it ran, the story was accompanied by a photo of the fake nickel that Walton was carrying at the time of his wreck. The photograph was shot so that the coin was visible in the foreground, while its owner’s face was obscured in the background. That face belonged to Ryan Givens, a nephew of George Walton, who was not willing to be named in the story—understandable given that his uncle and aunt had previously been burglarized—but who told me his mother had inherited the nickel Stack’s had declared to be a fake.
Stack’s declaration of the coin as an altered-date and the subsequent assaults on his reputation had stung Melva Givens—Ryan’s mother and George Walton’s youngest sibling. Melva obtained the nickel and, after a brief warning by treasury department officials not to try to pass it off as real, she stuck it in an envelope that she filed in a desk at her home near Dixie Caverns. (Melva, a teetotaler, also dumped her brother’s collection of vintage whiskey down the drain.)
Over the decades, the coin sat motionless in the desk, as life went on in the rooms around it.
In 1992, Melva Givens died. Her eldest son Ryan moved into the house.
“I remember seeing it. It was written on the envelope that it was fake. I didn’t even look at it, saying, ‘This is worthless,’” Ryan says.
He forgot about it, until estate lawyer Arthur Smith contacted him asking to examine—and perhaps purchase—the nickel. Smith offered Givens $5,000 on the spot, but Givens declined. “I told him it wasn’t really mine. It was part of my mom’s estate,” Givens says. “He said, ‘Until they do find the real one, this is it.’”
That comment got Givens’ head churning. Periodically after that, he’d remove the nickel from the envelope and spend hours gazing at it, just letting his mind wander.
“I’d sit here at night,” Givens says. “Your imagination just kind of runs, as to what could be, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that. One night I looked at it, I imagined the lady on there, Lady Liberty, maybe she’d say, ‘They say I’m not real. What do you think?’”
He soon got to find out.
The 2003 World’s Fair of Money
After my story was published Deisher contacted me in an effort to reach Givens. The ANA’s World’s Fair of Money that summer would feature the four known Liberty Nickels, and she hoped the fake coin might be displayed as a symbolic representation of the missing fifth one. Givens and his sister, Cheryl Myers, traveled to Baltimore for the show. By the time they left, they’d already begun to speculate as to whether the “fake” coin might actually be the real deal. Then-Roanoke Times photographer Eric Brady had volunteered to shoot some close-ups of the coin for diagnostic purposes, and Myers had set to work overlaying them against both real and known fake Liberty Nickels.
“It was easier to get an image of the real nickels than it was to get an image of altered-date nickels,” Myers says. “That was my problem. It wasn’t getting an image of a real nickel but a fake nickel. When I laid our image over top the Eliasburg [Liberty] nickel, it looked pretty darn close to me.”
The day before the convention, Givens, Cheryl Myers and her husband met Deisher and a panel of experts at the convention center. A brief meeting and examination of the coin ensued; the group agreed to meet again later that night with the other four Liberty Nickels present for comparison. The next few hours crept slowly by. Givens and the Myerses walked through the rest of the show to take it all in.
“Arrangements were made, since the other four coins would be in the security room at the convention center that night before going on public display the next morning,” Pearlman says. “We held a secret midnight meeting in the security room, with armed guards, where six people representing professional coin-grading services were able to examine side-by-side the four known genuine pieces with the Walton coin. Each expert looked at the coins, then they conferred among each other.”
The experts unanimously agreed: The coin that Stack’s had tagged as “fake” was in fact the real thing. The Walton nickel was the long-missing fifth Liberty Head Nickel.
Pearlman the publicist was thrilled: “It was a publicity stunt that, surprisingly, actually solved the decades-old mystery of what happened to a famous rare and valuable little nickel.”
The next morning, the Associated Press ran a story trumpeting the discovery of the long-lost fifth Liberty Nickel, and people lined up to view all five nickels, displayed together for the first time in decades.
Givens remembers standing to the side and taking it all in: “People didn’t know who we were. It was fun. I would have liked to say, ‘Hey, that’s my nickel.’ I never did but I’d think it.”
The day it was authenticated, Givens and Myers received a $2.2 million offer for the nickel, but they decided instead to hold onto it for a bit. They wanted to enjoy the moment and perhaps rehabilitate their uncle’s reputation.
A Reputation Rescued
Over the next decade, George Walton’s nickel appeared on display at the ANA’s headquarters and at conventions around the country. Its story fired the public imagination, and Walton’s reputation was reconsidered. Today, Walton is considered one of the premier collectors of his time—on par with Eliasberg, the collector who at one point held at least one of every coin produced up to that time.
“It’s difficult to rate collectors,” says Deisher. “You can measure by what their collections are sold for, or you can look at achievement in collecting. At the time his collection was sold, it set the world-record price for a single collection sold at auction in the United States. He meets the criteria for value. The other aspect that makes him a great collector is his early attention to varieties, and for completeness of a collection, and knowing his subject matter. He was an astute collector, researcher and scholar in southern gold coins. He was so far ahead of everyone else.”
So: Who was Walton, and how did he amass such a monumental set of collections?
Walton was born near Gogginsville (Franklin County) in 1905, the oldest of seven children. In a 1956 story in the Richmond News Leader, Walton recalled that he began collecting after his father caught him and his brother smoking “rabbit tobacco” behind a barn. He told them that if they put their money into something useful instead of cigarettes, it would become their fortune. In the same story, Walton said he won his first gold coin by wagering a coonskin against it in a wrestling match when he was 12. His coin-collecting continued through service in World War II and then into a career appraising estates for banks and trust companies in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.
Walton collected coins, paper, guns, swords, key-winding watches and Virginia historical artifacts, and he claimed, “It hasn’t cost me a penny.” Walton explained he had borrowed money on his collections, used the money to purchase property and let the returns from the property repay the loan and eventually cover the costs of his collections.
Southern gold became a focal point of his collecting activities. In an interview, Douglas Winter, one of the foremost authorities on U.S. gold coins, told Deisher that Walton’s gold was “probably the finest collection ever assembled.” Walton collected varieties and coins produced at specific mints, an angle that put him years ahead of his contemporaries in terms of sophistication.
When he died, Walton hadn’t amassed much cash or savings. His wealth was represented in his various collections. Through his life, he lived off his earnings as an estate appraiser and occasionally used his collections as collateral to obtain loans for cash-flow purposes.
“The monetary aspects of it weren’t as exciting to him as completing the collection,” Deisher says. “For him, it was the chase of the hunt.”
The question of how Walton obtained his 1913 Liberty Head Nickel remains unsolved, but the story believed by most has him obtaining it in a 1945 trade with a Winston-Salem millionaire, often rumored to be cigarette magnate R.J. Reynolds. The coin had been owned previously by Conway Bolt, another North Carolina collector whose son remembered Walton and his father talking about using the nickel as “trading bait” for their real interest, Southern gold.
The Payoff
The confirmation in Baltimore allowed the Givens family to redeem their uncle in the eyes of the coin-collecting world. Melva Givens would have loved it. Her children just felt relieved.
Ten years after the nickel was authenticated, and a century after it was minted, the Walton heirs decided to put the nickel up for auction. It sold for $3.2 million.
That leaves the question of how Stack’s screwed up.
Those who know the coin say it’s actually very understandable.
“On all five of the coins, somewhere on the coin surface, there’s at least one small defect, a planchet defect, and just through the luck of the draw, the defect on the Walton coin is right where the ‘3’ is located in the date 1913,” Pearlman says. “If you carefully look at the photo, you’ll see there’s a little something under the 3. Some people would think that was suspicious and that the date was altered from a 1910 to make the 0 look like a 3.”
Today, the Givens house looks very much the same as it did in 2003, when I first visited. Ryan Givens hasn’t retired from his day job, nor has he made any major purchases. He still lives the same life he did before discovering the nickel he’d looked at for years was in fact authentic.
And in many ways, he misses it.
“I spent so much time with it,” Givens says. “It was really quite a bit of fun for me even before it was authenticated. It was the fun of, y’know, imagination. The story of what it could be. Once you found out what it actually was, part of the mystery was gone. I got attached to it. I’d love to go and get it, and just bring it back here. Just have it where it was for 10 years when nobody knew what it was, nobody made it into anything special. It was just the nickel and me, sitting here.”