The late Larry H. Miller’s coin collection will be auctioned off to benefit the second Primary Children’s Hospital, planned for Lehi, and it’s a lot more than a few nickels and dimes.
The estimated value of the nearly 1,600 coins is more than $25 million, according to Stack’s Bowers Galleries in Santa Ana, Calif., which will conduct the auction. The donation will be part of the $50 million the Miller family announced it is giving to the project in January.
One of the coins in the collection — an 1804 Draped Bust Silver Dollar — is valued at more than $3 million all by itself. Among the other coins are:
• An 1894-S Barber dime, valued at $1.25 million and up.
• A 1794 flowing hair silver dollar, valued at $1 million and up.
• An 1884-S Morgan silver dollar, valued at $1 million and up.
• An 1886-O Morgan silver dollar, valued at $750,000 and up.
• An 1849 Mormon $10 coin, valued at $500,000 and up.
Stack’s Bowers will auction the coins in two separate sales on Nov. 12 and Dec. 17.
(Erin Alberty | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gail Miller, right, speaks with 9-year-old Nellie Mainor after a press conference announcing a gift of $50 million to Primary Children's Hospital from the Miller family on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020. Mainor, a patient at Primary Children's Hospital, recently underwent a kidney transplant. Intermountain Healthcare CEO Marc Harrison listens to Mainor.
According to the company, when Miller — who built a business empire that includes 65 car dealerships in seven states, the Megaplex Theatres chain and the Utah Jazz — died in 2009, he left instructions that his coin collection be sold. But his widow, Gail Miller, “knowing how much they meant to him ... could not bear to part with them.” But she has now decided “it was time to do something else with the value invested in the collection,” according to a press release, with the proceeds from the sale going to the new hospital.
Intermountain Healthcare’s Primary Children’s Hospital campus in Lehi is scheduled to open in 2023. Built on 38 acres near 3300 West and 2100 North, it will include a five-story, 468,000-square-foot hospital and a three-story medical office building.
