Sometime soon after 1857, Braidwood held one very sad punter.
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Now in 2017 it holds one very excited shop owner.
Re-doing the floors to his shop Braidwood Antiques, Derek Duffy found an 1857 half sovereign.
Initially, Mr Duffy thought the coin might be worth a few hundred dollars, so he put it away then forgot about it for months.
It turns out, it’s worth at least $8,000.
“It is a rare coin in that condition,” said Gary Cooke, Manager of coin dealers Edlins of Canberra.
When Mr Duffy showed the coin to him, Mr Cooke offered six thousand on the spot for it.
“We do see them, but never in this condition, they’re normally very rough by now,” Mr Cooke said.
Mr Duffy owes his find to luck.
His son found the coin while the pair were digging up the old floor of the building.
On a whim, Mr Duffy decided to sieve through the rubble. The flight of fancy has payed off in spades.
“Because there was so much rubble under there, and I knew we’d have to be under there to run cables, I thought we might as well go all out,” he said.
The first side of the shop produced a jar full of pre-decimal joins, all of little or no value.
It was when they began on the second side that things started to get interesting.
“The second shovel load, I held up something that was in the sieve and there were no lights inside, just the sunlight through the window, shining gold, and [I] realised it was a half sovereign,” Mr Duffy said.
Completely intact, the coin’s condition means it must have been lost fairly soon after it was minted, at the height of the gold rush through the Araluen Valley.
The coin is a Queen Victoria half sovereign from the Sydney Mint.
An indication of the value of the coin, is the cost of a house, Mr Cooke says.
The half sovereign was the equivalent of 10 shillings, or half a pound. A typical house in the 1850s might have cost between 30 and 40 pounds, he says.
Nothing is known about the coin’s original owner, but they must have been either extremely wealthy, or devastated by the loss.
“It’s always a mystery as far as when was it there or who lost it,” Mr Cooke said.
“Sovereigns were worth a lot of money, it’s a whole heap of coin back them.”
“Somebody must have had way too much money to not notice that it’s missing.”
Mr Duffy sees his find as emblematic of what is special about the Braidwood.
“I’m chuffed that it is worth something, and that we went to the trouble to screen the dirt coming out from under the floor,” he said.
“I think it’s part of the history of Braidwood that you can find gold on the main street.”
The sovereign will go to auction on Saturday October 28, with a reserve of $6,000. Mr Cooke is expecting at least $8,000 for it however.
And what will Mr Duffy do with the money? Well he thinks it might just about pay for a new floor.