, Legend Heading
LegendHeading
Recovered Hoard · A central Kentucky cornfield (undisclosed)

Great Kentucky Hoard

Great Kentucky Hoard: still unexplained.

◆ Evidence tier: TraditionBuried ~1863 · found 2023 – present◎ Recently discovered — still growing

The Story

What is claimed · what is sourced · what is still disputed

Morgan's raiders were coming, and somebody in Kentucky trusted no bank, so the gold went into the ground, eagle by eagle, and its owner went to whatever fate kept him from coming back. A hundred and sixty years later, a farmer's plow turned up the corner of it. He filmed himself counting coins out of the dirt with shaking hands: more than eight hundred, three million dollars' worth. The field is back in corn. The farmer is not saying where.

What remains open

  • No period map of the site has surfaced.
  • No contemporary press coverage has been found.

The lure: $3M+ · 800+ Civil War-era gold coins

How it was found: A man digging in his own Kentucky cornfield in 2023 turned up more than 700 gold coins from the Civil War era, buried and forgotten, almost certainly hidden by someone who never made it back.

Evidence & Corroboration

Distinct evidence classes that independently agree — never a single score

Historical tradition
Newspaper mention
Scholarly support
Archival evidence
Official map/chart
Corroborated
Verified fact

? Open

  • No period map of the site has surfaced.
  • No contemporary press coverage has been found.

Historic Maps

Period cartography · Library of Congress & DPLA via IIIF · deep-zoom

◇ No period cartography on file yet. The IIIF map adapters (Library of Congress, David Rumsey, DPLA) fill this automatically when they find charts of this place.

Period Newspaper Coverage

Dated OCR mentions · Chronicling America / loc.gov — a mention proves circulation, nothing more

◇ No dated newspaper coverage yet. Chronicling America runs against this legend automatically and lands dated clips here.

Archival Documents

Manuscripts, government records, company filings · NARA · IIIF · registries

◇ No archival documents on file yet. NARA and national-archive adapters attach primary records here as they surface.

Timeline

Every event source-backed · unsourced events are dropped, never invented

◇ No dated, source-backed events yet. Timeline entries are built only from evidence with a confirmed date -- nothing is estimated or invented.

Sources & Citations

Typed, first-class citations with retrieval provenance

◇ No typed citations compiled yet -- check Historic Maps, Newspapers, and Archives above as they fill in.

From the archive

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Possible connections

Unverified leads, not established facts — legends below share a rough area and a rough era with this one. Worth investigating, not worth citing.