Here is an "all mints set" of 1854 $3 gold coins. Philadelphia Dahlonega. This one has a small mintage of just 1,120 pieces. It's the only Dahlonega Mint $3 gold. This one was "a dream coin" for me for a long time. New Orleans. The mintage for this piece was 24,000. It's not super rare, but they are almost always weakly struck in one place or another. Charlotte Mint - This is a "never was" coin. The Charlotte Mint did not make any $3 gold coins even though the Philadelphia Mint sent two sets of dies to them. They just let the dies rust. This is "a Photoshop creation." The reason for issing the $3 gold coin has never been quite clear. For years people said that it was to facilitate the purchase of 100, 3 cent postage stamps. The cost was lowered to that at the time. The real reason was that Congress thought that a $3 coin would facilitate making change between $5 gold and other pieces. The coin was never popular, and the total mintage was limited to 537,824 business strikes plus an estimated 2,200 Proofs from 1854 to 1889.
