The Beale Treasure

In 1885 a 23-page pamphlet went on sale in Lynchburg, Virginia for 50 cents. It told of a man named Thomas Jefferson Beale. In the winters of 1819 and 1821, the pamphlet says, Beale buried a fortune in gold and silver "about four miles from Buford's" in Bedford County. He then left three sheets of numbered ciphers with a local innkeeper, Robert Morriss, and disappeared for good.

Beale had supposedly written that a friend would mail Morriss the key. It never came. Morriss held the box for decades, opened it, and could make nothing of the numbers. The pamphlet's unnamed author says he inherited the papers from Morriss and spent years on them before cracking the second sheet.

The break was the second cipher's key: the United States Declaration of Independence. Numbering the words of the Declaration and reading the first letter of each numbered word turns sheet two into plain English. It opens, "I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground." It then lists the haul. Sheet one, which gives the location, and sheet three, which names the heirs, use keys that no one has found.

The pamphlet made the story famous and left the hardest part unsolved. Buford's Tavern is now the town of Montvale, and for 140 years people have come to the hills around it with shovels, metal detectors, and their own readings of sheet one. The holes are real. The gold has never turned up.

The second cipher, solved. Read against the Declaration of Independence, it gives the contents and the phrase "four miles from Buford's," but not the exact spot. Credible as a decoding, silent on location.

The first cipher, unsolved. This is the sheet that supposedly gives the location. In 1980 the cryptographer Jim Gillogly ran it against the Declaration. Instead of random letters he got strings like "abfdefghiijklmmnohpp," long alphabetical runs that no plain message produces. One reading calls that the fingerprint of a hoax. Another calls it a second key nobody has found.

The hand behind the pamphlet. Analysts have found period-wrong words in the text. Joe Nickell's 1982 study argued the writing is James B. Ward's own, which would make Beale a character and the ciphers a puzzle Ward built.

The search area sits around Montvale and the foot of the Peaks of Otter, west of Bedford. Two working farms welcome visitors: Johnson's Orchard and the Peaks of Otter Winery, on Elmos Road in Bedford, open through the week with shorter winter hours. It is worth calling ahead in January and February, when hours drop to weekends.

The Peaks of Otter, including Sharp Top, are on the Blue Ridge Parkway about 20 minutes north, with parking, a lodge, and trails around Abbott Lake.

The surrounding land is private and mostly farmed. Searching or digging anywhere here needs the landowner's permission, and the county has a long history with uninvited treasure hunters. The best of the story is free: the 1885 pamphlet is out of copyright and online.