1855 $20 Liberty Head Double Eagle NGC UNC Details Saltwater Damage, Ex.Fort Capron Gold Coin Hoard

The Fort Capron Gold Coin Hoard

During the Third Seminole War, Army paymaster Major Jeremiah Yellot Dashiell was traveling to Fort Capron on the Indian River on the east coast of Florida with a leather pouch containing $23,000 in gold that had been withdrawn from the sub-treasury in Charleston, South Carolina. On May 1, 1857, his schooner was forced to anchor outside the Indian River Inlet, where sandbars made passage too hazardous. Dashiell boarded a small boat to complete the journey to the fort, but a freak wave swamped the vessel. The passengers survived, but the leather pouch sank to the bottom of the inlet and was swallowed by quicksand, irrecoverable. Dashiell's subsequent misfortunes — including a separate theft of $13,000 in gold at a Palatka hotel only weeks later — led the federal government to conclude that he was either extraordinarily unlucky or extraordinarily dishonest, and he was dismissed from service in July 1858.

One hundred and six years later, on the morning of March 10, 1963, two Fort Pierce locals — Al Ashley and the teenage Jim Gordy — were lobster hunting just north of the inlet when they spotted an unusual reef formation. Its surface was paved in gold: over 3,000 United States gold coins, the entire Fort Capron army payroll, lying in approximately twelve feet of water. What followed was a protracted legal ordeal. The finders initially reported recovering only 582 coins to the State of Florida while secretly selling the bulk of a haul that ultimately totaled more than 2,700 pieces. When the deception emerged in 1967, Ashley and the Gordys were sued by the State, and their coins were locked in bank escrow as collateral against loans gone bad. A settlement reached in 1972 resulted in the donation of 250 gold coins to the Florida State Collection, where they remain today. The total face value of the recovered hoard came to $23,010.50 — nearly precisely matching the $23,000 Dashiell had reported losing — strongly suggesting that Ashley and Gordy had recovered the cache in its entirety.