A corroded 1875 S twenty cent coin!

My 1875 S twenty cent coin that I actually got last year for my type set, since I'm a bottom feeder I'm pretty happy to have bought this coin for around 50 bucks! Maybe I'll upgrade it in the future, but not my top priority as of now.

 

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Hey, not a bad coin. Where did they come up with 20 Cents as a denomination ? Why did it not work ?

 

Ya know, that would fit just fine in my type set as well. Corroded? Sure. Does it have character? Absolutely.

 

I'll take one also

 

Google is your friend

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-cent_piece_(United_States_coin)


Usually, there is short write up about each coin type in the Red Book. That's always a good place to start IMO.

 

Thanks .. Interesting story.

 

It has character and looks like it worked for a living. Nice, in my opinion.

 

I was very fortunate as a young collector in the 50's. I got one in change from an old vegetable vendor who pushed his cart down the alleys of our neighborhood.

 

Why didn't the Twenty Cent Piece work? Here is the short answer. People had trouble telling these two coins a part. They had similar diameters.

 

Yeah. Agreed. I’d they’d used a different design I think they might have lasted. They did circulate quite a bit out west. As to the op coin a lot of details for $50.

 

You can see how I got one in change when I should have been given a quarter. I got beat out of 5 cents. But, my mom told me to keep it for my coin collection.

 

Still true to this day.......I was at an estate auction last Spring, auctioneer sold one as a quarter for a for a little over melt. I didn’t realized it happen until the auction was over. Someone got a great deal.

 

And some people resorted to desperate measures:

 

I have been looking for one of those "20" counterstamped Twenty Cent pieces for years. I had my chance in the 1970s and didn't take advantage of it. Now I have not seen one for sale for the last 45 years.

OOOPS! I forgot. There was one on eBay that I bid up to a few hundred dollars. I didn't get it.

Maybe the Chinese with start making them.

 

The US 20 cent coin was an experimental attempt to see if we could mesh our coins with the standards of the "Latin Monetary Union". The LMU was an effort to standardize the coinage of several countries based on the French franc so that all coins could be accepted in any of the member countries without going through a currency exchange. The US 20 cent coin would have been equal to the French 1 franc, Italian 1 lira etc. Was a good idea until many countries started issuing too much paper money (cheating).

 

I had never heard of the 20 cent piece until I saw one on ebay. I have not bid on anything for quite a while, but thankfully, the 20 cent piece was "Buy It Now". I don't remember what I paid for it, but it couldn't have been much. It wasn't in the greatest shape as above, but it had been certified by NGC, VF 35.

 

Well, if all else fails, you can buy numeric punches pretty cheap on eBay...

 

Enjoyed the post and a few chuckles also. Nice find

 

And some went the other way defacing the denomination off the back to try and pass them as quarters.

 

My question is why do we use a 25 cent coin, but not a $25 bill? [Canada issued a $25, but it was just a commemorative of a 25th anniversary, not something really intended to circulate.]