Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 1591223, member: 66&quot;]1851 was the highest mintage year.&nbsp; As mentioned most of those later years were only in the 2 - 6 million range.&nbsp; 1857 was only 333,000.&nbsp; And The USA was a big country, but most of the population lived in a small portion of it and the population was also much smaller back then.&nbsp; Still, it wasn&#039;t enough.&nbsp; Much of our commerce at the time was still done with foreign coins especially Spanish colony fractionals.&nbsp; it had been getting better though and by the late 1850&#039;s we were finally ready to switch over to out own coinage and remove the last of the legal tender status from the foreign coins.&nbsp; (Even without legal tender status the Spanish fractional continued to circulate in some areas until the 1870&#039;s.)</p><p><br /></p><p>Another reason for the low mintages though was probably because the price of copper had risen and the large heavy cents each contained over a cents worth of copper so the government was losing money on every coin they struck.&nbsp; Finally after six years of losses they reduced the size of the cent in 1857. (and in 1857 and 58 struck over 31 million of them)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in