New Leaves Turning Up and Down on Wisconsin State Quarters

from The Centinel Spring 2005 Volume 53, No. 1

Written by Samuel Ernst, YN

     I collect state quarters and I think they are really neat! Some collectors think the state quarter program is boring and a waste of time and money. Maybe now they will change their minds! Last December, a man in Tucson, Arizona, by the name of Bob Ford made a startling discovery. For 15 years, Mr. Ford has been going through coins from the bank looking for errors and varieties. On December 11th, while he was looking through some 2004-D Wisconsin quarters, he found "extra leaves" on the ears of corn on some of the coins. And he didn't find just one kind of new leaf... he found two! (I am from Nebraska and we call them "husks," but since everybody else is calling them "leaves," I will too.)
     One had an extra leaf up higher and closer to the ear of corn on the design. This one is called the "extra high or up leaf." The other has an extra leaf that is lower and comes out from the ear of corn. This one is called the "extra low or down leaf." Mr. Ford took the quarters to a coin dealer in Tucson, Rob Weiss of Old Pueblo Coin Exchange, to see if he had really found something neat, like a new variety. He had and things really started to happen!
     On January 11th the Arizona Daily Star newspaper wrote an article about the extra leaves and over night people came from all over to Tucson to look for Wisconsin quarters with the extra leaves. Coin World printed an article about the "extra leaves" in their January 10th issue called, "Markings on quarter leave mystery." In that article the writer, Eric von Klinger, said "...the appearances of the marks, appearing raised on the coins, are such that Coin World has asked the Mint, for the record, whether any design modifications were deliberately made." They have written another article about the "extra leaves" in their January 24th issue, too.
     While there are questions about what caused the "extra leaves," there is no question that there are a lot about it. On the of people talking Collector's Universe U.S. Coin Forum message boards, collectors and dealers have been wondering if the extra leaves were "die gouges, planchet defects, a hubbing accident or even an intentional added design element." I am a YN, so I don't really know about what all of that means yet, and even though I haven't seen the coins in person, I do know the "extra leaves" really do look like leaves in the pictures I've seen.

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