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.
Reeded Edge