Everyone loves a good buried treasure story. Even the FBI. The long-rumored stash of Union treasure has intrigued the U.S. federal government so much that they sent a team of FBI agents to attempt to retrieve the valuable cache of gold that went missing during the Civil War. Dozens of FBI agents were sent to a remote area of Pennsylvania to try to find a ton of gold that could be worth as much as $55 million.
This legend of massive riches dates back 155 years when a shipment of gold was headed to the U.S. Mint in Pennsylvania. The Civil War-era shipment was sent by President Abraham Lincoln on a 400-mile mission and was supposed to pay Union Army soldiers. However, the Battle of Gettysburg erupted in 1863, which caused the gold to be hidden to avoid seizure by Confederate soldiers. Legend has it that the cache of gold was hidden northeast of Pittsburgh. Treasure hunters have found the wagon train as well as dead Union soldiers in St. Marys, Pennsylvania, but the gold was nowhere to be found.
The treasure-hunting group, Finders Keepers, has been searching for this lost gold for several years and believe it was buried. The group has used powerful metal detectors to find a campsite of the transport team from 1863. However, it is illegal to dig on state property without permission and permits. “We found a bullet shell, knives, animal traps, zinc Mason jar lid, tin cans, bones (human or animal), whiskey bottle, campfire pit, and a lot more that the state now has and won’t return,” the Finders Keepers website said.
Now, the FBI and officials from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) will assist the treasure-hunting group in searching for the lost gold. There are about 55 million reasons why the government would want to track down this buried treasure. There are various accounts of how valuable the shipment was, but it could be as little as 26 gold bars and as much as 52 gold bars, each weighing 50 pounds. That would mean that there could be a stash of gold weighing up to 1.3 tons and worth as much as $55 million. Now the government wants to know where da gold at.