While scouring the front lawn of his 200-year-old farmhouse this March, Alan Bateman, of Canning, N.S., found an 1882 U.S. “Indian Head” cent.
An accomplished artist and long-time metal detectorist, Bateman posted a photograph of his 137-year-old find on Facebook, adding he found the badly worn coin in a spot he has “gone over for years” with his metal detector
More interesting than valuable, the coin could’ve been mistakenly lost by someone more than a century ago, he told CBC Radio’s Mainstreet: “For me, all the stuff I’ve found on my property, there’s a lot of very cool stuff but there’s no reason I would sell it. It’s much more value as part of the story of our house.”
The Indian Head cent was produced by the U.S. Mint from 1859-1909, and an 1882-dated example – like Bateman’s – is composed of 95 per cent copper and five per cent tin plus zinc.
Born in Nigeria in 1965, Bateman grew up in Burlington, Ont., before moving to Dartmouth, N.S., at the age of eight with his mother, sister and brother. He attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the mid-1980s and has exhibited extensively throughout Canada and the U.S.