And sometimes worth a mint for coin trader/investor/collector Kirk Kelly
A dollar’s a dollar. Except when it’s worth a half-million dollars or more. Kirk Kelly owns one such dollar from 1794. The fledgling US government minted fewer than 1,800 so-called “Flowing Hair Dollar” coins, engraved with Lady Liberty and her cascading locks on one side and an American eagle on the other.
Kelly bought the coin several years ago—part of doing business as founder and owner of Coin Depot on Poinsett Highway. Behind all the security bars on the unassuming storefront’s windows lie bars of gold and silver and rare currency.
His fascination with coins began when he was a teenager in Columbia, Missouri.
“I had a friend of mine that showed me that there were a bunch of coins you could find in circulation that were worth more than face value. And I guess that appealed to me,” he says. “When you’re a kid, you collect everything, bottle caps and beer cans, and coins just seemed like a natural.”
He graduated with a degree in graphics arts management in 1969 from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he began investing in coins. Several years later, when he was living in Miami, he learned about a coin dealer selling his store in Greenville.
He bought the place in 1974. Since then, he discovered that “Greenville’s actually not a very good coin town. It’s never been a coin town,” he says.
Nowadays—and especially since COVID—Coin Depot trades more in gold and silver than in antique currency, though he still buys and sells plenty of that through a sprawling numismatics network.
One recent summer afternoon, he’s perched behind the counter of a place that looks more like a reliquary-repair workshop than a store whose goods are worth a mint. The front counter holds several coins, laid out like high-end jewelry alongside precious metals, more silver than gold. The display case also includes stacks of 1-ounce pieces of silver that look like coins but are tangible, pocket-sized investments; today, you can buy one for $32. Next to those, 10-ounce silver bars sell for, well, around $3,200 apiece. He trades hard-to-find paper currency, too, but only in pristine condition.
Back in the day, coin dealers relied on teletypes, much like the ever-chattering ticker-tape machines that transmitted real-time stock prices on Wall Street.
“That’s basically the only thing we had, like a chatroom,” says Kelly, 77. “A lot of things were literally going up by the hour or down by the hour—very much like the stock market, exact same thing.”
He spends much of his day keeping an eye on the constantly fluctuating prices, gazing into what he and his colleagues still call “the teletype,” which the rest of us call simply a computer.
Rob Moore belongs to that network at his shop, Roswell Gold, Silver and Coins. Several months ago, Kelly says Moore told him that a customer walked into the Atlanta-area store with a $20 gold piece from 1861.
Says Kelly: “It happened to be one of about 10 made and turned out to be one of the finest. I advised him what to do to get the most out of it.” The coin sold for $700,000, he says.
Moore, who has known Kelly for 20-plus years, adds: “I’ve done a tremendous amount of business with him. I consider him a personal friend, as well as a business partner. He has always done what he said he would do and been rock solid in our many business dealings.”
On any given day, then, business can be a flip of the coin.
“It doesn’t happen very often,” Kelly says, “but the next guy in the door could have a half-a-million-dollar coin.”
Current Available Currency at Coin Depot
Here are a few of Coin Depot’s offerings from the store’s August and September catalogs.
$10 Indian Gold, minted from 1907 to 1933: $1,188 each
1914 $2½ Indian Gold: $545 each
1851-O $2½ Liberty Gold: $644 each
1921-D Mercury Dime: $488 each
1889-CC Morgan Dollar: $788 each
Two-cent pieces: 10 coins for $88
1928 $10 note (paper currency): $188 each
1928: $20 note: $209 each
1957: $1 Silver Certificate Star Note: $8.95 each
Source: Coin Depot
Gold and Silver Prices
As of 8:17 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Aug. 31, according to Forbes:
Price of gold: $1,947 per ounce, up .22% from the previous day’s price of $1,943 per ounce. The 52-week high was $1,977, the low during the same period $1,890.
Price of silver: $25 per ounce, down .02% from the previous day, and still the 52-week high. The low during the same period was $22.
Source for gold and silver: Forbes
