Gold comes out of the cellar and into the lore

My column several weeks ago chronicling the Depression-era story of two Baltimore youths, Theodore Jones, 16, and Henry Grob, 15, who turned up 3,558 gold coins in the dirt cellar of an Eden Street tenement, brought some interesting responses.

A full-length account of the find and subsequent legal wrangling over who owned the stash of coins that today would be worth more than $10 million is the subject of Leonard Augsburger's Treasure in the Cellar: A Tale of Gold in Depression-Era Baltimore, which was recently published by the Maryland Historical Society.

Former Baltimore Circuit Judge Peter D. Ward, now in private practice in Towson, wrote to say that the column "brought back a flood of memories from my last year of law school - the spring of 1962, to be exact - when I was assigned with a fellow student in my moot court class to represent Jones and Grob. (Although they may have been assigned other names - I can't now recall.)"

Ward said the only Maryland case law was Judge Eugene O'Dunne's opinion, which was published in The Daily Record.

"I award the whole of the contents of the copper pot of some $11,427 face value, to the infant defendants as finders of [a] treasure trove," wrote O'Dunne in his 1935 decision.

"But we did find some general authority in other states," Ward wrote. "I can't recall the outcome of our case, but I do remember we had a lot of fun researching the law of treasure trove, writing our brief, and arguing the case before our fellow students."

Howard J. Sapp, 80, a retired Social Security Administration disability examiner who lives in Pikesville, wrote to me and Augsburger to say that his family had a tangible connection to one of the 2 1/2-dollar gold pieces from the hoard the two boys had unearthed.

"My grandfather, Louis Gross, had a bakery and a grocery store at 239 S. Caroline St., in Baltimore from 1912 to 1938," he wrote in a letter.

Sapp was 8 years old when his mother, his grandfather's daughter, told him a story about hidden gold that had been found in a dank basement nearby.

"She told me that a widow, who lived up the street, about six or eight doors up on the same side of the street, had a son who dug up a pot of gold coins in the cellar," Sapp wrote.

"The boy's mother owed my grandfather a bill for groceries and paid him with a two-and-a-half-dollar gold piece. My mother admired this coin, about the size of a dime, and her father gave it to her."

Sapp said his mother put the coin in a safe that they had at home.

"This coin stayed in the safe from about 1934 until the early '60s," he said in a telephone interview the other day.

"In the early 1960s, my nephew and his father started a coin collection, mostly rolls of uncirculated coins. Upon hearing that her grandson was a coin collector, she gave the gold coin to him. His name is Eddie Patz, and upon his father's death, he inherited the collection," he wrote.

"In about 2003 or 2004, Eddie needed money to open a new business, and my sister, Eddie's mother, told me that he sold the coin collection to raise funds for the business," Sapp wrote.

"Whether he sold the ... gold piece, I really don't know. However, at the next family function, I will ask him," he wrote. "So, as you can see, the above traces the path of a single gold coin from that cellar on Eden Street, in Baltimore, [from] 1934 to 2004."

Sapp, who grew up in Irvington, recalled visiting his grandparents and their old neighborhood, which was an early target of slum clearance.

"We always spent the holidays there and [went] to synagogue at Beth Israel that was on Eden Street. They later moved to Broadway and Pratt," Sapp said.

"As soon as I read that story about the boys and their gold in the paper, a light lit up instantly. Even though it's an old story, I well remember my mother telling it to me," Sapp said.

Sapp, who was unable to reach his sister or nephew the other day, promised to let me know the fate of the gold coin dredged from a Baltimore cellar so long ago.

Leonard Augsburger will speak about "Treasure in the Cellar" at 4 p.m. today at the Baltimore Book Festival.

Related topic galleries: Laws, Pikesville, Baltimore Book Festival

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