First Indian Head of the Year

This beautiful 129 year old lady popped out of a roll tonight.
I'm pretty happy with it

 

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I have never found an IHC roll hunting. But it's been quite awhile since I have done pennies. Last time I did it I got a whole box of 2019. That killed it for me.

 

That is the absolute worst.
I'm surprised that I haven't any solid 2021 boxes yet this year. I have still gotten multiple boxes of solid 2020 though. It sucks to unwrap and dump them all.

 

Wow! I've never come across an IHC either; congratulations! It always amazes me that something like this wouldn't have been noticed and pulled from circulation.

 

Congratulations after hunting for years i found my first this St Patrick's day.A day or two after that I found my first buffalo,the Irishman must be on my side.

 

Picked up a box of cents and nickels last week. The box I got: 2015s. I'm pretty sure it was a dump box of mine from long ago...go figure. The nickels were mixed though, so at least one box to search (after 4 or so years off). I think it's because I returned about 3/4 of the box in the original wrappers. If I rewrapped them, they'd have sent it out for a recount. My mistake.

 

Hope this isn’t hijacking the thread, but wanted to show some of the nice older pennies I did find CRH. I have about 5 rolls of. Wheaties. 1 roll of 2009 Lincoln cents and 5 rolls of stuff I thought was cool! Toners.

 

I keep the nicer coppers in separate rolls. I don't mess with the zinc ones though.

 

Customer wrapped or Loomis roll?

 

Bank wrapped roll.

 

What @potty dollar 1878 said

 

Nice find Furry! Hope I find one CRH one day!!!

 

I had been averaging one IHC out of about every $800 searched. I am closing in on almost $20,000 worth of cents searched.

 

Why a 129 yr old lady. Looks like a Dude to me!! HaHa!

 

This is from wikipedia:

Design[edit]
Longacre advocated his Indian Head design in an August 21, 1858, letter to Snowden:

From the copper shores of Lake Superior, to the silver mountains of Potosi from the Ojibwa to the Araucanian, the feathered tiara is as characteristic of the primitive races of our hemisphere, as the turban is of the Asiatic. Nor is there anything in its decorative character, repulsive to the association of Liberty ... It is more appropriate than the Phrygian cap, the emblem rather of the emancipated slave, than of the independent freeman, of those who are able to say "we were never in bondage to any man". I regard then this emblem of America as a proper and well defined portion of our national inheritance; and having now the opportunity of consecrating it as a memorial of Liberty, 'our Liberty', American Liberty; why not use it? One more graceful can scarcely be devised. We have only to determine that it shall be appropriate, and all the world outside of us cannot wrest it from us.[9]

By numismatic legend, the facial features of the goddess Liberty on the obverse of the Indian Head cent were based on the features of Longacre's daughter Sarah; the tale runs that she was at the mint one day when she tried on the headdress of one of a number of Native Americans who were visiting, and her father sketched her. However, Sarah Longacre was 30 years old and married in 1858, not 12 as in the tale, and Longacre himself stated that the face was based on a statue of Crouching Venus in Philadelphia on loan from the Vatican.[7] He did often sketch his elder daughter, and there are resemblances between the depictions of Sarah and the various representations of Liberty on his coins of the 1850s. These tales were apparently extant at the time, as Snowden, writing to Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb in November 1858, denied that the coin was based "on any human features in the Longacre family".[10][11] Lee F. McKenzie, in his 1991 article on Longacre, notes that any artist can be influenced by many things, but calls the story "essentially false".[12]

Regardless of who posed for Longacre, the facial features of the "Indian" are essentially Caucasian, meaning that a Caucasian woman wears the headdress of a Native American man. Longacre had, in 1854, designed the three-dollar piece with a female with similar features (also supposedly based on the museum sculpture) but a more fanciful headdress, and adapted that design for the gold dollar.[13] Officials were aware of this artistic license at the time of issue; Snowden, in his November 1858 letter to Cobb, characterizes the two earlier coins as "the artists at the Mint evidently not realizing the absurd incongruity of placing this most masculine attribute of the warrior brave on the head of a woman".[13] Longacre would not be the last to juxtapose the features of a White woman with an Indian headdress reserved for men; Augustus Saint-Gaudens, for the Indian Head eagle (1907), produced a similar design. Later issues depict more accurate Indians, including Bela Lyon Pratt's Indian Head gold pieces (1908), the Buffalo nickel (1913) by James Earle Fraser, who worked from Native American models, and the Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar (1926), designed by Fraser and his wife Laura.[14][15]


Cornelius Vermeule thought the Indian Head cent was better than Longacre's 1859 pattern half dollar.
Art historian Cornelius Vermeule had mixed emotions about the Indian Head cent: "Longacre enriched the mythology of American coinage in a pleasant if unpretentious fashion. Given his pattern half-dollar designs of 1859 as a yardstick, he could have done worse."[16] In another comparison, Vermeule suggested, "far from a major creation aesthetically or iconographically, and far less attractive to the eye than the [flying eagle], the Indian head cent was at least to achieve the blessing of popular appeal. The coin became perhaps the most beloved and typically American of any piece great or small in the American series. Great art the coin was not, but it was one of the first products of the United States mints to achieve the common touch."[16]

 

Interesting data point. When I got back into CRH events about 7 years ago, on the very first box I was searching with my son, a 1902 Indian lay in the pile of cents. He thought it was foreign at first, until he read the coin. We didn't see another Indian head cent after that. I did switch to mainly nickels after that, and I've found it easier to find V nickels. Fun find Furryfrog (say that 10x fast).

 

My son’s first box of cents had a 1907 in it. Talk about getting them hooked fast haha.
I’ve searched about $50k of nickels and only found two V nickels. I finally stopped searching them but I may switch back after the W quarters die down.

 

I think I'm going to start searching for more W's I've only found one so far.Keep an eye out for those crossing the delaware quarters you might find one early.

 

I've hit the lottery at least 3 times with nickels. Here was one of those events:

 

CWR or BWR?