THE PHANTOM SILVER DOLLARS OF 1895

The Morgan dollar has long been one of the most popular American coin series, apparently second only to the Lincoln cent in the number of people who collect it in some manner, and the 1895-P dollar has long been called “The King of Morgan Dollars.”

However, for an equally long time it has been one of the more frustrating series to the collector who seeks completeness in his sets, as no numismatist has ever been able to fill the 1895-P hole in his Whitman album or Capital plastic holder with a genuine business strike specimen, despite a reported mintage of exactly 12,000 coins.

Wealthy collectors have usually been able to fill that hole with one of the 880 Proofs struck in that year.

Though none was ever found, reference books continued to list the 12,000 pieces as having been struck, and collectors held out the hope that someday, somewhere one of them would turn up. Collectors remembered how the extremely rare 1903-O Morgan dollar, most of which had indeed disappeared in 1918, became much less rare in 1962 when several hundred thousand pieces were discovered in Treasury vaults, and various second or third hand reports about findings of so-called business strike 1895’s, invariably circulated Proofs, kept the myth alive.

Even now I hear the numismatic equivalents of “urban legends” about how supposedly the famous coin dealer B. Max Mehl kept an original bag of 1895-P dollars in his safe, or that the Las Vegas Mafia has two bags, or other such nonsense. Now, however, there is convincing evidence that the 12,000 business strikes reported for 1895 never existed, or at least that if 12,000 coins were released in 1895 they were actually dated 1894!

Q. David Bowers, in his monumental “Silver Dollars & Trade Dollars of the United States, An Encyclopedia,” presents an amazingly in-depth reference source of contemporary accounts of all U.S. dollars that could not be duplicated without a lifetime of research. While having the privilege to read this book in galley form, I noticed a comment from George W. Rice in an article from the June, 1898 Numismatist that I had not seen before, which stated “In 1895, Proofs only, numbering less than 1,000, were struck.”

This comment has generally been overlooked in the modern study of Morgan dollars, yet it clearly states that no business strikes were known to exist or had even been produced long before the 1918 melting occurred. Bowers also quotes Pennsylvania dealer, ANA Governor and for many years the ANA’s official counterfeit detector Charles Steigerwalt as writing in “The Curio” in December of 1898 that “Dollars of 1895 from the Philadelphia Mint are only found in the Proof sets.”

Henry T. Hettger has followed up on the questions raised in Bowers’ book with an article published in the May/June 1994 issue of Bowers and Merena’s “Rare Coin Review” that does prove to my satisfaction that the 1895 business strikes never existed.

To read the complete article, see:
Coin Profiles – The Phantom Silver Dollars Of 1895 (www.coinweek.com/coins/coin-profiles/coin-profiles-the-phantom-silver-dollars-of-1895/)

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