I love Morgan Dollars. I recently inherited a handful of coins from a relative who passed away...including a couple Morgan's. Nothing special...but one coin in particular is quite strange. It's a circulated 1882-O and it has clearly been cleaned at one time. The reverse is white...but the obverse has some strange coloring. The left side is kind of the field is orange and the right side is more of a black color. I don't know if this could happen naturally because I have never seen anything like it before. Any opinions?
Since it was dipped , you can never tell what strange toning patterns can happen . I really don't think there was an attempt at AT on this Morgan .
What makes you suspect it was dipped. I see fine lines that look like the coin was cleaned...and it is a bit light on the luster. I guess over-dipping would explain the luster.
I think it likely that you have seen similar coins many times, you're just not recognizing it in this case. Think if you will of coins you have seen where the toning was quite heavy and black on one side, fading off to other colors across the rest of the coin. Now imagine what that coin might look like after somebody had tried to clean the toning off the coin. I think that exactly what you have here.
I think you're right Doug. I just think the toning was so strange that thought didn't cross my mind. But, now that I actually sit down and thing about it...I'll bet that's exactly what happened. I know this coin has been in my family for many years and none of them would have cleaned it. So, it was likely cleaned before they had it...so decades ago.
Cleaned only the coin knows that for sure! But to me from your photos it looks like an end coin from a old roll.end coins got all the grime and water what ever,there a few marks the show up it your photo that make think roll end coin.
I feel that the toning is natural on your coin and I'm sure that it has never been intentionally cleaned since it has been in your family as you stated. Morgans can be really temperamental. Some tone so nicely with wonderful colors and others just turn black or have variations of black toning on them. I call the black toning tarnish and to me it is so different than the lovely toned coins. It is like comparing apples to oranges.
Even if the coin has been in his family for 50 years, and we assume that none of them ever did anything to the coin - which is not really a fair assumption to begin with; what about the approximately 80 years before his family ever laid hands on the coin ? Are you going to assume that none of the previous owners ever cleaned or dipped it either ?
I constantly find myself advising the kids in my kid's coin club, if it's toning (a.k.a., "tarnish"), it's natural. They're young and impressionable, you see, and some of them still think coin collecting boils down to being a detective. I can't blame them. I don't want them falling into that trap, though. Not with my coins, anyway. And, I've gifted them many such coins, to get them started. Now I forget what I was going to say. Oh yeah. Forget about trying to detect the manner or mode of onset of the toning. Forget about centering your collecting habits on that. Keep your eye on the face of the coin, derive your conclusions on what your eye can see, and never let anybody, I don't care who they are, influence you to take your "minds eye" off the coin and derive your conclusions, thusly, on what your eye can't see. That, the latter, is a sucker's game, pure and simple.
My grandmother own Tanner Bank in Catskill N.Y. she had roll there but that was back in the late 1950&60's. She order most of them to keep me from hanging out with the Hippy's she would say :devil:
What these folks need is a Recorder of Coins Office. The model for that, of course, would be a County Recorder of Deeds Office. That way they'd have a record chain-of-custody on every coin just in case they should ever feel the need to have to go back and verify whether a particular tarnished coin is "natural" and hence "original." I think it's a step in the right direction, anyway. I think I'll suggest it to PCGS.
There were definitely rolls of Morgans available Jello, I used to buy them. And there are rolls of Morgans available even today. But never once have I ever seen, or even heard of, Morgans in a shot-gun roll. In other words, they came in the rolls where the ends of the roll were folded over. They did not come in the rolls where the end of the paper roll was crimped up into a tight circle around the outer edge of the coin. So those arrows you put on the pictures do not in any way indicate that the coin has roll toning - because the coins were never in rolls like that.
Guess I just assumed it was dipped because you said it was cleaned . Figured dipped because if done right it leaves the luster like your coin has . That ands the way it looks .
Doug playing Devils advocate here , couldn't anyone with the proper equipment crimp the rolls closed .
Dunno, maybe. But to my knowledge nobody has ever made a crimping head that will fit Morgan dollar rolls.
