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Recovered Hoard · Recovered

Great Kentucky Hoard

Buried ~1863 · found 2023, A central Kentucky cornfield (undisclosed)
RECOVERED
Evidence status: Historical tradition. no documented source (historical tradition); legal status unknown (manual verification recommended). This account is presented as historical tradition, not verified fact. Manual verification recommended. Repository evidence: 0 sources · 0 timeline events · 0 media items · legal unknown · view on the Map Evidence on file: historical tradition

Great Kentucky Hoard: still unexplained.

$3M+ · 800+ Civil War-era gold coins

The subject
Great Kentucky Hoard
The manifest
$3M+ · 800+ Civil War-era gold coins
The account

Morgan's raiders were coming, and somebody in Kentucky trusted no bank, so the gold went into the ground, eagle by eagle, and its owner went to whatever fate kept him from coming back. A hundred and sixty years later, a farmer's plow turned up the corner of it. He filmed himself counting coins out of the dirt with shaking hands: more than eight hundred, three million dollars' worth. The field is back in corn. The farmer is not saying where.

How it was found
  • A man digging in his own Kentucky cornfield in 2023 turned up more than 700 gold coins from the Civil War era, buried and forgotten, almost certainly hidden by someone who never made it back.
What the record holds

What remains open

  • No period map of the site has surfaced.
  • No contemporary press coverage has been found.
What we know, and what we don't
Established

No documentary claim is yet established. The account rests on tradition.

Still open
  • No period map of the site has surfaced.
  • No contemporary press coverage has been found.
The evidence room

No documentary or visual exhibits have been located yet. The trail below and the open leads are where this dossier grows next — every exhibit that enters here carries a source.

Where the trail points now
  • Search Library of Congress + DPLA (IIIF) for period cartography of the site.
  • Run Chronicling America for dated newspaper mentions.
  • Query NARA for archival records tied to the site.

Have a source, a map, or a clipping? Add a lead and it enters the record with its citation.

Start the hunt here
The first leads, so no one walks in cold.
Sources and the record
Related case files

The full hunt kit

Starting brief, what's known and disputed, evidence timeline, source list, map card, coordinate-confidence and legal-access summaries, and a field checklist, free with a Fellowship account.

Latest Word From the Newswire

Context, not proof. The dossier's own sources remain the evidence record.

Checking the wire…

Chart position 37.500°, -85.400° (approx.) View on the Map