Newman Portal Search of the Week: Isaac Excell

A Newman Portal user this week searched for “Isaac Excell.” Excell was a Chicago collector who consigned to two Ben Green sales (1903, 1905) and one sale of B. Max Mehl (1927). Both of the Green sales include runs of hard times tokens consigned by Excell and cataloged by Low numbers. The August 2012 Stack’s Bowers sale catalog of the Battle Born collection places Excell in the pedigree chain of the finest known 1872-CC quarter (MS66, the next finest being MS62), privately sold to John H. Clapp in August 1905. This covers his numismatic activities but tells us little about Excell himself. We can surmise he was a longtime collector with widely spaced auction consignments. An 1875 Chicago city directory places him as a “commercial merchant” with the firm of Butts & Excell at 184 S. Water Street, while a Centralia, IL newspaper of 1876 narrows it down to the fruit business. The 1920 census lists him as living with his daughter and son-in-law and notes that his parents were from the UK. A genealogy search finally indicates a death date of 1925, and Mehl’s Coin Circular, March 1927, includes a testimonial from the administrator (son-in-law John Wallace) of the Excell estate. The existence of the finest known 1872-CC quarter in his collection is the unanswered question – how could such a coin, the finest known by four grading points, come into the collection of a little-known Chicago collector?Link to Ben Green sales: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/auctioncompanydetail/510851Link to B. Max Mehl sales: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/auctioncompanydetail/5Link to B. Max Mehl’s Coin Circular: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/publisherdetail/511632Link to Stack’s Bowers catalogs: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/auctioncompanydetail/3