Bags and boxes of ’em!
Cleaning out their father-in-law’s old home in Los Angeles, a family has found a forgotten cache of a million copper pennies (https://ktla.com/news/california/family-finds-1-million-copper-pennies-while-cleaning-out-los-angeles-home/). Not that anyone has counted them one by one, but a million is the estimate.
What do you do with a million copper pennies? The bank wouldn’t take them: the vault was too small to hold them. So they loaded a truck and drove–very slowly and carefully!–all the way back home to Ontario.
Crikey, it was like King Tut’s tomb! They had to navigate a crawl space to get to the treasure trove. In such a vast quantity of coins, there are bound to be some unique coins worth a fortune in themselves. But even if there weren’t, that’s at least ten thousand dollars’ worth of pennies!
You never know what you’re going to find stashed away in some old home that was inhabited for many, many years.
That’s a lot of coins to hoard. One has to wonder why someone would do that. Pennies have not been made of pure copper in nearly 200 years, due to the fact that it would require more than one cent’s worth of copper to make a penny.
FWIW, The Internet sez the US minted copper pennies until 1943 when they switched to copper-coated zinc. There were also those cool steel pennies.
As I understand it, the copper went from pure copper to a zinc/copper alloy in 1937. During the ware, they needed all the copper they could get, so they changed things dramatically, at that point.
The first house we rented when married was old, and I used to fantasize about there being a stash of money hidden by a former renter/owner in the attic. The day I finally explored the attic, no treasure. Maybe that man’s dad had a penny collection and would buy a $50.00 bad of pennies at a time to go through them and then stashed them away. A friend of mine used to do that back in the early 1960’s and I helped him look for valuable pennies. I found a 1909 S VDB penny, probably the most valuable penny there is!! Unfortunately for me it was his and he was only 13 years old so no reward of finder’s fee.
I’m no coin collector, but I have heard of the 1909 S VDB (for Victor D. Brenner, the artist). Wow, that’s a find!