"I have deposited in the county of Bedford Virginia, about four miles from Buford, in an excavation or vault six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number three herewith.  The first deposit consisted of ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold and thirty eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver deposited."

Virginia's best-know lost fortune is said to consist of thousands of pounds of gold and silver and a fortune in jewels.  Some say it's a hoax, but hundreds of hopeful treasure hunters would like to believe otherwise.

In 1817, a party of 30 Virginians led by Thomas Jefferson Beale left to try their luck mining in Colorado.  They struck a rich vein of gold and silver in the south-central part of the state, which they worked for a year and a half before the accumulating wealth started to make some of them uncomfortable.  Beale and eight others went back to Virginia to bury two truckloads of nuggets while the others stayed and mined.

The party arrived at Goose Creek in Bedford County in November 1818, following a fain trail through a gap in the Blue Ridge foothills near the Peaks of Otter.  Snow covered their tracks as they dug a square pit six feet deep, lined it with flat stones and filled it with iron cooking pots filled with treasure.  The last concealing spadeful fell in December, and within two months they had rejoined their comrades.

After two more years of mining, Beale led another trip back to the same spot, and a second load joined the first.  This time he decided to leave a message for his partners in Colorado in case something happened to his group on the return.  Three numerical ciphers detailing the location of the hoard, the contents of the vault, the name of the party were put in a strongbox and given to Lynchburg innkeeper Robert Morris, with instructions to open it if no one returned in 10 years.

Beale and his crew left once more for Colorado, and Morris never saw any of them again.  Two months later, he received a letter saying the keys to the code were in the mail, and then nothing.  As the years passed, Morris gradually forgot about the strongbox, until he happened upon it decades later while searching for a harness in a shed.  After trying for years to decipher the codes, morris showed them to a friend, who managed to break the one describing the vault using a key based on the Declaration of Independence. The other two were made public Click Herebut remain a mystery despite the efforts of decoding experts and computer codebreakers.