Post your lowest "mintage" coin in your collection.

The calculated mintage for this 1796 No Stars Quarter Eagle is 963. The reason I say that is because the number in the Red Book comes from the following calculation. There were 66 coins issued according to a mint warrant issued in, I believe, September 1796. There were 897 coins issued on a second warrant later, for a total of 963 coins. There were 432 coins issued in January 1797, which are thought to be the 1796 With Stars Quarter Eagles.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Only 163 of these... and 2 are mine

 

Great topic! I love the history of coins and rarity makes them more interesting to me. I've got an ugly 1916 Standing Liberty Quarter, ICG FR02 Details, Damaged (my avatar) The 1916 Standing Liberty quarter is the first issue in the series. These coins were not struck until the last two weeks of 1916, and they were released in January, 1917. The mintage is consequently very low, a mere 52,000 coins, making this issue the lowest mintage by far in the Standing Liberty quarter series and indeed one of the lowest mintage U.S. coins of the 20th century (info from David Hall). The 1916s are even more rare because the dates wore off easily because of the raised design and a lot were melted down. I'm also fortunate to have a Details 1875 20 Cent Piece - Philadelphia mint - Mintage 36,910 and a Details ugly AG 1860-S Seated Liberty Quarter - Mintage 56,000, a cleaned MS60 1893 Isabella Quarter (Columbia Exposition Commemorative) Mintage 24,191 and some lower mintage Morgans, including a nice MS62 1884-CC Morgan $1 Mintage 1,136,000 and a really dinged up Details VG10 1893-O Morgan $1 Mintage 300,000. The 1893-O dollar posted the lowest mintage figure for any New Orleans Mint silver dollar of the Morgan design (from PCGS).

 

My lowest mintage US coin:

 

This 1936-D Texas half dollar has the 2nd lowest mintage of all my US coins. Only 9,039 were produced. The “Classic Commemorative” coins tend to have low mintages but high survival rates. Thus they’re not rare despite the low mintage numbers.



I’m surprised that the Texas half dollar is seldom mentioned in discussions of the most beautiful US coins. This is by far one of my favorite designs of any commemorative coin.



I like how the reverse design was inspired by Greco-Roman coinage in the depiction of Nike, the winged goddess of victory.

 

4th highest mintage of the series but still low at 41,820 is my 1874 $3 gold piece.

 

Without pix it didn't happen

 

I'm not absolutely sure of the lowest mintage coin in my pile, honestly, but it's probably the 1854 Half Cent (NGC AU55 BN) with a reported mintage of 55,358. Some have disputed the accuracy of these older mintage numbers, but very few people saw the Half Cent as monetarily useful by 1854, so who knows?

 

Contrast with today, when our cent, purchasing power about 1/17 of that half-cent in 1854, is still minted by the billions. Maybe people were smarter back then.

 

Slight thread-jack, sorry.

Yes, arguably all current pocket change, including the quarter, exists now for the same reason that the half cent existed: to make change. Apart from receiving change from a purchase, what else can one really do today with a nickel, a dime or a quarter? Not too much.

Even baseball cards now cost more than $1.00 a pack (though one can argue that their demographics have moved far away from kids). I remember buying them for 20¢ or 25¢ a pack, which really wasn't that long ago, so receiving a single quarter from someone back then meant actually buying something. I think more than just the cent lingers in precarious monetary circumstances today.

The continued existence of the aluminum Japanese 1 Yen coin, worth 0.0077 of a dollar, remains even more of a mystery.

 

Here's one of my lowest mintage Gold coins, only 300 coins minted in Half Sovereign size!