A view of the William R. Pettit House in Fayette County, August 1952, about 90 years after a fortune is said to have been buried on the property. (Image courtesy of the University of Kentucky, Clay Lancaster Kentucky Architectural Photographs Collection.)
Nothing excites a coin collector quite as much as hidden treasure waiting to be found. The great numismatic historian Q. David Bowers has tapped into that primal interest many times over the years, in articles and in popular books including Lost and Found Coin Hoards and Treasures.
Hidden-treasure stories are about coins, but on a more fundamental level they’re about people, and the Bluegrass State has its share of related personalities. We’ve met some of them in this column—like the generous real-estate businessman “Uncle Steve” Landrum, who may have left part of his fortune hidden in Glasgow, Kentucky.
When William Pettit saw storm clouds on the horizon, he didn’t keep his money in paper—like these notes from state-chartered banks in Bardstown, Bowling Green, Lexington, and Russellville. (Image courtesy of Stack’s Bowers Galleries.) Hover to zoom.
Treasure stories aren’t just about the people who hide, lose, or hoard them. The most satisfying ones are also about the people who find them, whether they’re farmhands tilling a tobacco field, adventurous boys exploring a basement, metal-detectorists searching an old schoolyard, or scientists using the latest technology to pinpoint a shipwreck. Silver, gold, and other treasures are out there waiting to be found, by accident or through hard work. The exciting part is that the finders can be any of us—if we’re lucky, or smart, or both.
One story of buried Kentucky gold involves a beautiful new mansion and the fog of war.
In the late 1850s, on Nicholasville Pike in Lexington, Kentucky, William R. Pettit built his stately home. The finely proportioned Greek Revival house would be surrounded by honeysuckle and roses and tree-shaded lawns.
Pettit withdrew his money from the bank in gold coins—probably, for the sake of convenience, the largest denominations available, like these $20 Liberty Head double eagles from the 1850s. (Image courtesy of Stack’s Bowers Galleries.)
According to local lore, when national hostilities erupted in 1861 Pettit went to his bank in Lexington and withdrew as much of his wealth as he could—not in paper currency, which might collapse in value during wartime, but in hard money: Good old-fashioned gold.
Did Union forces under General Stephen Burbridge find Pettit’s buried gold? No record of any such discovery exists. But the fog of war can obscure things. . . . (Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
Pettit buried the coins somewhere on his property for safekeeping, but they weren’t safe for long. He and his family were compelled to evacuate after General Stephen Burbridge, the “Butcher of Kentucky,” commandeered his mansion for the use of the Union. Details are sketchy, but Pettit is said to have fallen sick after the war and died before he was able to retrieve the gold or communicate its location to his family. One of his former slaves, “Little George,” supposedly visited the estate every spring for many years, begging permission to dig for the gold under the cellar floor.
The property went to Pettit’s widow and children after he died in 1868. It was sold in 1887 and became a school for boys, Alleghan Academy. From that era onward the mansion was known as Alleghan Hall. Over the ensuing decades the old Pettit house changed ownership several times, being bought by families wealthy enough to afford a fine old estate.
By the 1960s the Kentucky climate and normal wear and tear had taken their toll. The house, more than a hundred years old, was condemned and demolished in 1966.
With the old mansion destroyed, the buried gold of William Pettit is gone forever.
Or is it?
On March 23, 2021, Governor Andy Beshear commissioned Whitman Publishing’s Dennis Tucker as a Kentucky Colonel—the highest honor awarded by the Commonwealth—in recognition of his career in book publishing and for promoting knowledge of Kentucky’s status as an important subject within American numismatics. Tucker’s column “From the Colonel’s Desk” explores the rich history of Kentucky embodied in coins, tokens, medals, paper money, private currency, and related artifacts of material culture.
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Your policy as stated is remarkable in that I can’t believe you would not want to be on the cutting edge of the hobby?1 It is exactly what the establishment has not yet recognized the gives us a look at what may be in the coming?
i think they found it very recently in kentucky, look it up