Published in the spring of 1885, The Beale Papers may be the earliest unsolved American “mystery cache”. The anonymous author of this twenty-one page pamphlet conveyed a story of an epic journey of exploration that resulted in the discovery of a fortune in gold and the creation of secret ciphers that would reveal the location of the hidden treasure.
In the one hundred and twenty-one years since its publication, The Beale Papers has become legendary in the cryptography and treasure hunting worlds. Only one of the three ciphers has ever been solved successfully. The exact location of the treasure is supposedly revealed in one of the remaining unsolved ciphers.
If The Beale Papers are genuine, somewhere six feet under the ground in Virginia is over $30 million in gold stored in iron pots!
The coordinates listed are not of the actual cache location but are of a nearby benchmark and serve only as a general reference point. To reveal the cache location you must first solve The Beale Papers Revisited cipher. A study of the original The Beale Papers story will divulge the means. Additional search hints are provided by viewing the spoiler photos.
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In honor of greengecko, for all the fun caches he provided back when geocaching was a young sport.
Congratulations to 'The 3 Brothers C' for being the First to Find!