THE RITTENHOUSE PEDIGREE PROBLEM

The finest known 1792 half disme, the Cardinal MS68 coin, is coming up for auction again. Readers may be interested in the story behind the Rittenhouse pedigree. I wrote to Karl Moulton about the pedigree and this was his response on September 10, 2015.

When Martin Logies (Cardinal collection) was helping to publish the Henry Voigt book (which came out in 2007), he and I were talking on the phone one evening when he related that he had just acquired a 1792 half disme - MS 68 in an NGC holder.

I naturally asked him about it and he mentioned the Knoxville connection, and that he had recently acquired the coin from Contursi for, I believe, $1.5 million.

The following day, my mind got the better of me because that characteristics of the coin he described seemed familiar. It turns out that I had recently put my nose in the 1919 ANA sale by Henry Chapman and had actually remembered his description (which I thought was a near perfect match).

When Martin and I next spoke, I asked him to have the coin in hand. He wasn't aware of the 1919 ANA sale, so I read it to him. He agreed on all points of the description, so I told him that he had the identical piece and it was from Rittenhouse family.

He announced this shortly afterwards (don't know exactly how or where) and it was thought of as that coin ever since. Come to think about it, it probably was first announced on the Voigt book cover."

So, the Rittenhouse pedigree was established over the phone based on one old lot description and no consideration of other coins or lot descriptions. It must be a Rittenhouse coin because that is what it states on the PCGS holder.

When I read the Cardinal lot description in the Stack's Bowers sale of January 24, 2013, lot 13093, I noticed something I had missed before. The catalog reproduced the Chapman 10/4/1919 lot 249 description. It said:

In my opinion, if the Chapman coin shows file marks and the Cardinal coin does not, they are not the same coin. The Pittman coin has light scratches near the obverse rim and the Bartlett coin has heavy scratches, making both better matches to the Chapman coin.

I wrote up my thoughts for page 150 of 1792: Birth of a Nation's Coinage. The Cardinal coin cannot be traced back before the Stack's sale of October 18, 1988.

The buyer of the coin in 2013 was Brian Hendelson. I talked with him at the Central States show on April 26, 2013, and told him my opinion on the coin. I followed up and sent him a draft of my text on May 12, 2013.

Hendelson loaned the coin to the ANA for display at the 2013 World's Fair of Money. I wrote to ANA Curator Doug Mudd on July 22, 2013, and told him of the problems with the Rittenhouse attribution. The ANA continued to exhibit the coin several times as the Rittenhouse coin.

As publication of the book approached, I sent Hendelson a draft of the coin description on March 3, 2016. He did not respond, continued to exhibit the coin and sold it with the Rittenhouse pedigree around May 2018.

Now it is being offered at auction again with pedigree back only to 1988. The current lot description states, "we make no claims today that the presently offered example is the same coin that Henry Chapman sold in 1919, yet we cannot rule out that possibility."