Continuing with our blog series covering Whitman Publishing’s 100 Greatest United States Coins, we take a closer look at not necessarily the one of the most acclaimed gold coins in U.S. history, but perhaps one of the most evasive. This alone makes it a rarity that author Jeff Garrett will help us understand by unearthing some of its backstory.
#62 – 1854-S Liberty Head Half Eagle
According to author Jeff Garrett, the idea of collecting branch mint coins became popular after the publishing of Treatise on the Coinage of the United States Branch Mints by Augustus G. Heaton. This had collectors and numismatists in the hobby looking for specific mint marked coins, leading to the realization that they were some of the rarest of issues.
One of those issues was the 1854-S half eagle. Only 268 were struck at the minting facility of San Francisco that year. However, only three of those coins are known to exist today. No one really knows why the mintage was so low that year, but speculation was that depositors preferred larger denomination coins because they were easier to store and count. All three known examples are now a part of private collections.
In 1960, the 1854-S Liberty Head Half Eagle was valued at $5,000 for an About Uncirculated condition. By this fourth edition (2015), it was valued at $2.5 million.
