Our story begins June 11. Plumbers were digging a trench to run utilities for a pool house and swimming pool on property Hodge had purchased adjacent to his home on Oldham Circle in Amarillo. Randy McMinn had a backhoe about a foot deep when on one particular scoop, mixed in with the dirt, was found a bunch of dingy little objects.
Whoa, time out. Work came to a halt, and closer inspection revealed them to be coins - old coins from 1887. Careful digging found a lot more in some kind of fine plastic, what Margaret, Hodge's wife, described as sort of an old version of Saran Wrap. Lest anyone think plastic is a recent invention, plastic was used as early as World War I.
The coins had Lady Liberty on one side and the American eagle on the other. A little bit of homework found them to be Morgan silver dollars, which were minted from 1878 to 1904. A count of the coins totaled 100 ... 150 ... 200 ... 250 ... 300 of them.
Avast, matey, buried treasure!
"I'm thinking, 'Oh my stars, this is unbelievable,' " Margaret said. "Then all these questions start running through my head. Were they stolen? Who did they belong to? Were they really ours just because we owned the lot?
"After you get over the initial excitement of buried treasure, then I'm thinking, 'I don't want to keep them if they're not ours. Is this illegal? I don't want to break the law. We're not going to end up in jail, are we?'
Let's see, the answers would be don't know, don't know, yes, no and no.
So, how much of a buried treasure do we have here? The coins had no mint identification. The Hodges did some research and asking around, and no identification meant the coins were made in Philadelphia. It also meant the coins, in their uncirculated mint condition, were worth about $20 to $30 apiece.
Franky Hill of Amarillo Coin Exchange confirmed as much. And too bad the coins didn't have an 'S' on them.
"If they had been made in San Francisco, they would be worth about $200 each starting out," Hill said. "And if they are in real good condition, they are worth hundreds of dollars, depending on the number of contact marks."
Well, it's known now how much they are worth, and how they were found. What's not known, and what's most intriguing of all, is how these 300 1887 mint condition Morgan silver dollars got there.
"When was Billy the Kid shot?" Jerry Hodge said. "And Frank and Jesse James were in this part of the country, too."
Alas, Billy the Kid went to his maker in 1881, and Jesse James was shot in the back in 1882, too early for the 1887 coins.
What about Bonnie and Clyde? What about some unsolved bank robbery when the bad guy was killed before he could get away and find his stashed loot?
Hodge, chairman of the board of Maxor National Pharmacies, recalls a conversation 40 years ago with the late Dr. George Royse. Royse told of his tending to Clyde Barrow back in the 1930s after a car wreck. Royse also told Hodge of two men he knew in Oklahoma who'd robbed a bank and came to Amarillo in a getaway. Hmmm.
Hodge has tried to piece together the history of the property, which the city first owned in 1927. Before that, it was the Wolflin family farm. The property, which is actually on Parker Street, has gone through several owners, including two former attorneys in the 1940s and early 1950.
The most likely theory is that someone, probably during the Depression, was afraid of banks and buried some valuable coins and may have died without telling anyone of them. Sounds good to me, though not quite as thrilling as Clyde Barrow's ill-gotten gains.
Interesting times in those days. Former Amarillo National Bank President Tol Ware told Hodge he used to play baseball in that area back in the 1930s and it was not uncommon for a fun-loving fellow to hide his alcohol near there during those Prohibition days.
"I've told Tol we have not yet found his Scotch," Hodge said.
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