Coin Buyers Serving Waxahachie, TX

Cotton money and courthouse-square history

Waxahachie was laid out in 1850 as the seat of Ellis County, and cotton made it rich. By the 1890s the county was confident enough to build one of the finest courthouses in Texas. Finished in 1897, the Ellis County Courthouse is a Richardsonian Romanesque landmark of red and gray granite and red sandstone hauled from the Pecos River, trimmed with carved faces cut by European stonemasons. Walk the square once and you understand how much money moved through this town.

That cotton wealth went into houses as well. Waxahachie's Victorian homes, with their turned porch posts and gingerbread trim, are the reason for the Gingerbread Trail home tours and the reason filmmakers came here in the 1980s for Places in the Heart and Tender Mercies. The city also calls itself the Crape Myrtle Capital of Texas, and in summer the old streets show why.

Old houses hold old money. Before 1935, national banks around the country issued their own currency printed with the bank's name and town, and Waxahachie banks were among them. A note from a hometown bank is the kind of thing a family keeps in a desk for a century. We also see large-size notes from before 1929, blue seal silver certificates, and the gold coins that cotton buyers and landowners saved before 1933. If you find paper money in an old house, keep it flat and do not tape, iron or press it.

Trinity University was in Waxahachie from 1902 to 1942, and the college families, ministers and teachers who lived near it left a different kind of collection: Liberty Seated and Barber coins, early commemorative half dollars, and type sets kept in old cardboard albums. These albums are worth handling carefully. Pull a coin out roughly and you can scratch it; better to bring the whole album and let us work page by page.

Rural Ellis County adds its own finds. Farm families from around Waxahachie often kept silver dollars and pre-1965 quarters in a coffee can, and ranch estates sometimes include gold rings, pocket watches and sterling buckles. We test all of it, metal and coin alike, and price each piece on its own.

A photo ID is required to sell. We meet by weekday appointment on request, and big Ellis County estates can call to set up a home appointment.