Jacob Lipson, Heritage Auctions, was cataloging an upcoming sale and discovered a new 1843-C $2.50, small date, die pairing. The December Beverly Hills Signature Sale #1282 lot number 3697 description reads: A new and remarkable discovery for the specialist. It has long been believed that a single die pair was used to strike 2,988 Small […]
Numismatic Guaranty Corporation® (NGC®) Numismatic Guaranty Corporation® (NGC®) has graded the Hornets Nest Collection, the first complete set of Charlotte Mint gold coins ever assembled. Notably, the collection includes an NGC VF 20 specimen of the legendary 1849-C Open Wreath Gold Dollar, one of the rarest United States coins. The seed of the Hornets Nest […]
Stack’s Bowers Galleries numismatist and cataloger, James McCartney, recently posted on the company’s website about the upcoming auction sale of the famed 1861 Dahlonega Gold Dollar. What makes this coin so interesting is that all 1861-D gold dollars were struck by the Confederacy. Despite a vacuum of knowledge and skills relevant to the minting process, […]
Professional numismatist and rare coin dealer Doug Winter recently posted his analysis of the Dr. Steven Duckor’s gold dollar collection that sold at the Heritage 2014 Platinum Night auction session, August 13, 2015, ANA U.S. Coins Auctions in Chicago, Illinois. The collection contained two of the finest know Charlotte and Dahlonega one-dollar gold coins. The […]
Before I began researching the amount of gold coinage produced by the members of the Bechtler family in North Carolina in the mid-19th century, I consulted my copy of Private Gold Coins and Patterns of the United States by Donald Kagin. The book includes a table that is probably familiar to anyone acquainted with the Bechtler […]
The Annual Report of the Director of the Mint normally included details that year’s coin production. However, the 1887 Annual Report included, for the first time, a table showing the mintage by denomination and mint, for each year from 1792. The Report stated that “[t]his valuable table, which has been compiled with no little care and […]
The operations of the New Orleans Mint, unlike the other US Mints, clearly fall into two periods: the Antebellum Period (from 1838 to early 1861), when the New Orleans Mint operated in a thriving city that exported the products of the Mississippi River valley and, the Post-Civil War Period (from 1878 to 1909), when New Orleans […]
For the citizens of the United States, and as well for the collector of Southern Gold, 1861 was a pivotal year in our history. Of course, this was the year in which the decades of tension between the northern states and the southern states finally devolved into what is now known as the Civil War. For […]
Gold was first discovered in North Carolina in 1799, but it was five years before anyone made the arduous journey to deposit some at the Philadelphia Mint so that it could be turned into coins. A total of about $11,000 was deposited in 1804, but thereafter, deposits averaged only $2,500 annually until 1824, which marked […]