A CANCELLED CARSON CITY HALF DOLLAR DIE

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V17 2014 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 17, Number 10, March 9, 2014, Article 12

Here's an excerpt from another great article from the March 2014 issue of The E-Gobrecht, an electronic publication of the Liberty Seated Collectors Club, edited by Bill Bugert. The article is by Bill himself, titled Cancelled Carson City Half Dollar Die: Which Die Marriage? In it Bill gives a nice shout-out to The E-Sylum. Thanks! -Editor

In late January, David Sundman, President of the Littleton Coin Company and Treasurer of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society, [You should consider joining if you are not already a member - see www.coinbooks.org.—Editor] sent me an email with the following information and images. This article is an extract of my research and answer to David.

Per David, “I thought you might enjoy these images of a Carson City half dollar cancelled reverse die, circa 1875 that I bought several years ago from Fred Weinberg. What is unusual is that it is lightly cancelled, without the prominent “X” through the entire design. Fred described it as circa 1875. I was thinking that possibly you or one of your project participants might be able to tell me the year(s) it would have been used to produce coinage? My dream would be to obtain a coin that had been struck from this die—but realize that is like searching for a needle in a hay stack! According to Fred Weinberg, this dies had been used by a Virginia City, NV family as a doorstop.”

Background facts. I studied the images of the die and determined that it is a half dollar die with a large size CC mintmark of the Carson City Branch Mint. As I detail in my book, A Register of Liber-ty Seated Half Dollar Die Varieties, Volume II, Carson City Branch Mint, a total of six Carson City reverse dies with a large CC mintmark are known to have mint half dollars. These six dies were used during five years of coinage at the Carson City Branch Mint.

According to mine and Randy Wiley’s 1980’s research of the National Archive’s mint correspondence files, the Philadelphia Mint shipped reverse dies (presumed to be Large CC) to the Carson City Branch Mint as early as October 20, 1869 when two reverse dies were received. Carson City received other reverse dies almost yearly but a different size mintmark was not introduced in half dollar Carson City coinage until 1873.

Of particular note is the question, “is your half dollar die one of these six dies?” In short, yes it is! Your die has diagnostics that match die #1 (used only in 1870-CC with die pair WB-1A, die marriage WB-1 shown in the image at the right). Those diagnostics include the position of the letters CC on the die. Please note that a letter C logotype was punched into the die two times in slightly different unique positions to make up the CC mintmark. To confirm that the die is the same as the die #1, I overlayed the image of the 1870-CC WB-1 mintmark on the die. I flipped the image of your die to give the same perspective as a coin. The following overlayed image shows an exact match in the mintmark position between the die and the WB-1 variety.

Conclusion / Opinion. It is my opinion that David Sundman’s Carson City half dollar die (as depicted in this letter) is the same die that was used to mint 1870-CC WB-1 half dollars. It is not currently known to have been used to coin any half dollars in another year. I am unsure when the die was canceled but it was the practice of the time for the Branch Mint to cancel all used dies.

In searching my personal files, I determined this die sold in a December 2003 Holabird Americana Auction. The following image is a scan of the Numismatic News announcement of the sale of this die.

Can you use it to strike for me a specimen in Hershey’s dark chocolate?