Treasure Tales and Treasure Stories About West Virginia from the Archives of Lost Treasure Magazine

When the Silver Craze Hit

Before the Civil War, a silver craze struck the area of Doddridge, Lewis and Harrison Counties. Small amounts of silver were found by different people. A hole in the side of a mountain on Dry Fork, near Big Issac in Doddridge County, is the entrance to what was once a cave with a smelter for melting ore and counterfeiting silver dollars.

In 1929, Solomon Day, aged 86, gave this account of the store to a newspaper. "The silver was pure, there was no doubt of that, and was gotten from several different places. The crime was in using a government stamp on the coins. A prominent farmer named Abraham Coffindaffer told me of seeing as much as a half bushel of silver dollars and there was every reason to believe that plenty of silver existed in the region. A man named Childers made the money molds in his blacksmith shop. When officers went to arrest him, he escaped by swimming a large creek. He was never seen again. A gang passed the counterfeit coins up and down the West Fork River.

"What finally broke up the gang was the arrest of Isaac Perine, the gang leader. He was put in prison for a term. When he was released, he assaulted a young girl. A mob took him to Tom's Fort and he was never seen again. So he didn't get any of the silver he knew about. Some people still look for these mines and buried silver, but so far as I know they have never been found. . . "