Wheat Penny Hunt

One thing you might not know about me - I'm a coin collector, specifically of pennies and nickels. I recently ordered a large lot of pennies from eBay, and will be looking through 75 rolls of them on stream to see if there are any valuable ones. This means I'll be looking at about 3500 pennies.

These coins were rolled mostly in Las Vegas casinos in the 1960s and given out to guests as they stayed at the hotel. The hope was that they would put them in the slot machines, get hooked, and end up gambling a bunch more money. Some of these rolls survived, and a seller I know on eBay purchased hundreds of them. Many of those rolls ended up breaking since they were decades old, so he put the coins from the broken rolls into a bunch of plastic tubes and sent them to me.

Since these coins were (mostly) wrapped in the 1960s, most of the coins in them will be what's known as "wheat pennies". Pennies minted from 1909-1958 have the same front as today, with Abraham Lincoln facing to the right, but their back is different. They feature wheat ears surrounding the phrase "one cent". Wheat pennies on their own carry a bit of a premium, with even a common coin worth about 3-4 cents, but there are rare ones worth a lot more.

There are two things to look at on a wheat penny - the year, and the mintmark. The year just tells you the year it was minted, but the mintmark tells you where it was minted - D = Denver, S = San Francisco, no mintmark = Philadelphia. My goal here will be to look through the 3500 coins and see if any particularly valuable ones are inside. Coins from the 1950s and 1940s typically aren't too exciting, but the 1930s and before have certain date/mintmark combinations worth a lot of money. The 1914-D, for instance, is worth at least $150 even in bad shape, but can sell for $1,000 or more depending on its condition.

I'm not expecting to find anything too extraordinary in here, but even getting a few coins worth $15-20 would be great. I have a price guide I'll be looking at to help figure out what's of significant value. It should take me a few hours to get through all these coins, so here's hoping it's worthwhile in the end.