Coin Buyers Serving Oak Park

Rare coins and old notes from Oak Park estates

Oak Park has the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, the house where Ernest Hemingway was born and whole blocks of Prairie School homes. Sellers who look for coin buyers in Oak Park are often living in houses like these, or emptying one. Families tend to keep them a long time, and the coins inside can go back several generations.

Austin Boulevard marks the east edge of the village where it meets Chicago, Harlem Avenue runs along the west side, and the Eisenhower cuts across the south end. Inside those lines, an old desk or a locked trunk can hold coins nobody has looked at since the person who saved them died.

Families usually call us once the house is headed for sale. Proof sets and mint sets bought by a later generation often sit in the same trunk.

Homes of this age are where coins from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition turn up. Visitors paid $1 at the fair for a Columbian half dollar, with Columbus on the front and the Santa Maria over two hemispheres on the back, and took it home as a souvenir. Worn Columbian halves are common, since the Mint struck about 4 million dated 1893, and they sell for a little more than their silver.

The Isabella quarter shows a crowned Queen Isabella on the front and a kneeling woman holding a distaff and spindle on the back. It sells well above its silver in any grade, because only 24,214 were sold at the fair and the rest were melted.

Old Oak Park safes give up paper money as well. We see large-size notes from before 1929, silver certificates, red seal notes and National Bank Notes.

A National Bank Note carries the name and charter number of the local bank that issued it, and Illinois notes, small-town ones most of all, draw collectors. Leave old notes unfolded and out of tape if you can.

Historic-home estates often run through an executor or an attorney, and our written, item-by-item list gives them a clear record of each coin and note with its price. It is a free purchase appraisal.

If the estate needs a certified appraisal for probate or insurance, that comes from a separate appraiser. Executors handling a large estate can bring up a home visit on the first call.