Would some amount of gold coins made at the NC/GA mints have been distributed locally? Or simply mixed in with other mints and distributed as normal? I’d think the people of the surrounding communities would have liked to/been proud of using their own local coinage, but I don’t know how things ran back then.
Looking forward to seeing what the smart folks have to say..... I had always thought that the Carson City, Charlotte and Dahlonega mints were established specifically to utilize locally discovered resources but I never considered how they were distributed from there.
I have always read the mints back then did not try to redistribute coins based on mints, and distributed locally as allowed to minimize costs. I know what you are saying, the mint started such things maybe in the 60s to thwart coin collectors, but I have always heard more D and C gold was distributed locally. It well could end up in the north, paying for trade, but they were not intentionally moved north or west by the Federal government from what I have ever read. This is part of the reason for small mintages, the south simply had a tiny economy compared to the north at the time, (main reason north won the Civil War). Interesting question. If anyone has better references than I have read would love to hear about it.
That's what I always read. To avoid the cost and risk of sending unrefined gold/silver cross country. I doubt that local distribution of coinage was the primary reason but it may have played a part, particularly with Carson City. With CC, not only was the silver local to the mint, but coining there eliminated the cost and risk of shipping coins back west from Philly or NO.
I’ve always known it to be a mint was established where gold was found and that the mint was for local distribution.
Charlotte (mintmark "C") and Dahlonega (mintmark "D") are generally considerably more expensive than their contemporary fellows from Philadelphia. They are also known for being generally less well-struck. You can see many examples on the Heritage Auctions website archives.
Makes sense, I just doubted there was a high demand for more gold coins in those two areas as opposed to production beginning due to sizable deposits being found. Seems like I should be traveling up north more often, the closer to Charlotte the higher the odds of getting lucky detecting!
If you go, good luck detecting and find out and obey the laws. North Carolina had a few strange ones.
Yes, of course as others pointed out, the mints were located there because of local ore. I was just saying the mint made gold in Philadelphia and a smaller amount at Charlotte and Dahlonega. Once made, it would have been silly to ship Philadelphia coins to Atlanta, Nashville, New Orleans, (before their own mint), etc when the southern mints were closer. So therefor the distribution of the southern mints tended to be in the south for simple minimization of distribution costs. Therefor more were found initially, (before coin collectors), in the south than elsewhere. However, they were coins meant to be traded, so of course some would naturally circulate everywhere.
Thanks. I've lived in North Carolina for over 50 years and never heard that a mint was in Charlotte. Now I need to find out where Dhalonega is.
I believe that most of the coinage, at least in the early days of the mints, was done to order. A customer would come in with high grade ore / nuggets / etc and deposit it at the mint, which would process the ore and mint coins as requested by the customer. The process was paid for with part of the gold through seigniorage. I don't know how long this lasted at each mint, but someone probably has access to the records of the various deposit customer orders.
I have heard this, but only at the Philadelphia mint mainly in the 18th century. Part of the mint act was mining on demand. Customers could bring pm in, and have it struck in whatever denomination they wished. The mint would do so, and pay them in copper the residual value of the pm. However, the mint was able charge a fee if they agreed to immediate exchange the ore for coins immediately. The mint was not allowed to charge to strike the ore to demand. There was no seignorage really on the earliest mint pm coins, only copper. They didn't trust the government, so a $5 coin had to have $5 in gold in it. Only later did there become seignorage in coins.
I can see the wheels in your head turning, knowing that you're a SC area detectorist. As someone who's lived and detected in both GA and NC (with visits to FL, SC, and TN), those questions about how C- and D-mint gold coins circulated were always in the back of my mind, too. Always fun to daydream about! (Never mind the privately minted stuff like Bechtlers...)
