Featured A brief history of the Pilgrim commemorative half dollar

The thing about the classic commemoratives is that they are available in such high grades. I have a complete 50 piece type set on the NGC registry in grades ranging from MS-63 to MS-66, yet my set ranks something like 96. That is by far the lowest ranking I have for any of my sets.

My “key coins”, like the Hawaiian and Hudson, are graded MS-64. My Spanish Trail is an MS-66, and my Lafayette Dollar is graded MS-63. The set is not junk, but you can see that it does not amount to much in the grand order of things.

Having said that, I am glad that I did not buy better coins when I was building the set. If I had, I would have been down even more money than I am now. Prices on these coins have dropped like a rock.

When I was retiring and going out of business, I had to blow the commemorative half dollars out for as little as 20% under Greysheet bid get rid of them. If the dealers to whom I sold them had held them, they would be losing money now according to the Greysheet prices.

 

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For 30 years folks have been saying that prices were going up but I never did see it. I did see some with really pretty toning bring crazy prices but believe the prices on those have dropped.
My set is nothing special. Mostly raw and worth less than I paid. With that said, I still enjoy owning it.

 

Excellent historical article! Please note that I am not trying to "nit-pick" but the Pilgrims/Puritans "emigrated" to America, not immigrated. They were immigrants when they landed near Provincetown. Very common mistake that certainly does not detract from your excellent history lesson. Thanks for the useful info!

 

Digging the past can be interesting as well as shocking. My daughter had her DNA tested and it showed Asian DNA. She was shocked but, I wasn't. Half my family came from eastern Europe so it's easy to figure out that it's very likely that when the Mongols invaded that part of the world "things" happened.