Why are o-mint Morgan dollars weakly struck?

Yep, thanks for posting Mike, great info.

I found the quote for Wayne Miller's book:

Wayne Miller The Morgan and Peace Dollar Textbook p. 33-34

- It's definitely a book I would recommend.

 

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Interesting. Hmmm, according to Q. David Bowers it was the spacing of the dies.

 

I think there were a number of contributing factors...which resulted in weakness being normal for some of the years (not all).

 

I've been reading the Q David Bowers book on Morgans the past few weeks, I really love these coins and want to learn about their history and all, to help me be more knowledgable when I purchase them. I get a bit lost with some of the technical jargon, so this thread helped clarify some terms that I was stumbling over. Thanks all!

 

Based on Q. David Bowers book on Morgan Silver Dollars he states:

The New Orleans Mint - "Regarding Morgan silver dollars, many millions wer struck there, but most were simply bagged and tossed into storage vaults. Coins were made with little attentin to quality, and the dies in the press were spaced slightly farther apart than they should have been. As a result the metal in the planchets did not flow into the deepest recesses of the dies. Accordingly, it is the rule, not the exception, that for many dates of New Orleans dollars there are flat areas at the center of the obverse and the center of the reverse. Among the worst of the bunch is 1891-O".

 

Actually Raider got it right, it was the result of improper annealing of the Planchets. This is according to Roger Burdette and he has seen and quoted from the New Orleans Mint documents in the National Archives. The striking problem had been noted and investigators from Philadelphia determined that the cause was too many planchets being fed into the annealing furnaces and insufficient anealing of the planchets. This left the planchets harder than they should have been and they would not strike up. They even INCREASED the stiking pressure in an attempt to improve the strikes but that just resulted in the dies wearing ou or breaking faster. When the planchets were properly annealed they struck up fine and the problem was solved for awhile. But as demand for striking increased the went back to the "high speed" annealing again, and the poor strikes returned.

 

Check out the book "History of the U.S. mint and it's Coinage." I think you'd find it very interesting. The branch mints were built based on location and sometimes on politics, and they were highly political places to work once they were there. Back in the day, many cities including NYC and St. Louis wanted to get a mint built but they never got approved. The Philly mint was kind of the mother mint. All the branch mints were treated somewhat as 'ugly step children' to some extent. The dies were made in Philly and had to be shipped out to all the branch mints.

 

Lol I've also heard that the Carson City mint and the San Francisco mint didn't get along, I forget what book I read it in, maybe Bowers book. Anyway I believe it had something to do with the mints being so close to each other, they though the other mint was stealing their business. So I guess the San Francisco mint was real happy after 1893 .

 

Well, if I remember right, the CC mint was lucky to have ever existed. I think a lot of people were against it being built but it finally got approved. It was a highly political mint to work at where employees were cleared out when Grover Cleveland took office. A lot of corruption.

Most of the silver mined in the area at that time had to be shipped over the Sierra Nevada mountains to S.F. which was costly and involved some risk from bandits. The mint director at the time was largely opposed to having any branch mints.
The House Ways and Means committee reported favorably on it though and noted that most of the refined metal coming from the S.F. mint was being shipped over seas and lost to the domestic economy. It was thought that a mint further inland would likely keep it's product within the U.S., which would save the U.S. treasury money. The Nevada mint bill passed both the house and senate in a single day on March 3, 1863.

It struggled to get going because of the Civil war, construction woes and dollars. It was closed and re-opened several times.
It was closed, re-opened than closed again. Everyone anticipated that it would open again but then it was proven in 1895 that several mint employees and prominent community members had been pilfering bullion from the mint which pretty much did CC in. It was re-opened in June 1896 for refining bullion into ingots only. In 1899 a bill was passed making it an assay office only, sealing it's fate and in August, 22 tons of remaining CC silver dollars were taken away by train and all of the coining equipment disassembled. Some of these went to New Orleans to get an 'O' MM stamped over them.

CC refined gold and silver from Nevada and neighboring states until 1933. 1941 it became the Nevada state museum. In 1965, an old 1890's flywheel press at CC was shipped up to Denver and put back into service out of desperation to produce coins to meet the requirements of production that year.

Surprisingly, Congress appropriated a bill for $100,000 for construction of a branch mint at The Dalles, Oregon also, to accomodate the gold that was being found in that area. A private firm was minting $5 and $10 gold there already but just for a year. Just as what had happened in Charlotte and Dolenegha. But when construction began in 1869, the gold supply had begun to dwindle. The mint's stone and brick arches for the basement were constructed but the project was suspended.
Would make a good trivia question. :smile

 

Actually the entire Mint building was finished at The Dalles.

And from what I recall silver brought to the CC mint was charged a surcharge that eqaled the freight charge to San Francisco thus eliminating any benefit to having a mint close to the silver mines.