One of the Greats

Collectors have long associated Baltimore, Maryland, with coins. Many know the city as the home of the Whitman Coin Expo, which started as a regional coin show in 1972; however, it has also been home to some of the greatest collectors of U.S. coins ever. Names like Louis Eliasberg, T. Harrison and John Work Garrett, and Waldo Newcomer are familiar to virtually every student of U.S. numismatics. Most collectors, though, do not realize that all these legendary numismatists had roots in the Baltimore banking community, which produced one of the mid-19th century’s pioneering collectors, Colonel Mendes Cohen, a generation before T. Harrison Garrett. Notably, Cohen’s predecessor is the earliest Baltimore collector that we know of, Robert Gilmor Jr.

The Gilmor Family

Gilmor’s father, Robert Gilmor Sr., was born in Scotland to a wealthy family and moved to Maryland in the late 1760s, where he established himself as a merchant and financier. Following the Revolutionary War, Gilmor’s connection to Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris helped him develop relationships with Dutch bankers. These relationships cemented the Gilmor family’s position as one of the most powerful in Maryland and one of the wealthiest in the United States.

A New Hobby

Robert Jr. was a born collector. He began amassing mineral specimens and fossils at a fairly young age. In 1790 a friend of his father’s sent Gilmor some fossils for his collection and included a group of ancient coins with them. The letter accompanying the gift admonished Gilmor that “their use is to be found in their connection with authors and times of which no scholar should be ignorant, and in serving as ocular demonstration of the deeds of heroes and princes long buried in the dust.”

Gilmor joined his father’s business as a partner in 1799 and soon after began traveling across Europe, embarking on his grand tour of the continent in 1800 and 1801. While visiting the Imperial Cabinet of Natural History in Vienna, he wrote to his brother, “The Cabinet of Medals is extremely valuable, and contains gold medals a size I had no conception of.” Exposed to the museums of Europe, Gilmor began to conceive of his collection as something more significant than a personal cabinet of curiosities. He became fascinated with the idea of creating a repository of objects that would illustrate European and American history and culture.

Gilmor’s Collection

By the 1820s, Gilmor began to “conceive the plan of forming a collection of American gold, silver, and copper coin from the establishment of the mint to the present time.” More than a century before Louis Eliasberg, and long before any guidebooks had been published, the Baltimore businessman began collecting U.S. coins with an eye for completion. He collected congressional mint reports in order to determine precisely what a complete set of U.S. coins would include. Leveraging his connections, Gilmor developed a friendship with Adam Eckfeldt, getting the mint’s chief coiner to send him pattern coins, proofs, and medals. He also claimed to have inspired “the excellent Mintmaster at Philad[elphia]” to “set the Mint to make a similar collection.”

By the 1840s, Gilmor had assembled what was likely the greatest collection of coins in North America. His U.S. federal collection was nearly complete, and his pre-federal holdings included the first New York-style Brasher doubloon known in private hands. When the Smithsonian Institution was established in the mid-1840s, Gilmor expressed his interest in selling his collections to the new museum. The institution rebuffed him, and he found himself in failing health. Desperate, Gilmor advertised “Interesting Collections for sale” in the 1848 American Journal of Science and Art. He was able to sell some of his collections privately, but he passed away on November 30, 1848. 

His Legacy

An auction of Gilmor’s coin collection was advertised in 1849, but it is unclear whether his coins were sold or if the sale was withdrawn. Some scholars believe that most of the collection may have passed intact to his nephew, Robert Gilmor III, while others claim that some of the numismatic material was sold privately by Gibson & Company, the auction house that handled the rest of his estate. Either way, the provenance of only a handful of coins today can be traced to Baltimore’s first great collector. The rest of Gilmor’s numismatic legacy remains a mystery. 

A version of this article appears in the June 2025 issue of The Numismatist (money.org)