Morgan Dollar Engraved Chittenden to Crittenden, March 13, 1878 (2 days after first minting)
airplanenut
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This Morgan dollar came in a consignment and I'm wondering if anyone has any additional information about it. The piece is engraved March 13, 1878, which is two days after the first Morgan dollar was struck. I don't know with certainty who the engraved names are, but Simeon B. Chittenden was a US representative from NY in 1878 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_B._Chittenden ) and Thomas Theodore Crittenden was a representative from Missouri at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Theodore_Crittenden ). They would certainly seem like the kind of people with early access to one of the coins.
When I first saw the coin, I was reminded of the first New Orleans Morgan dollar, which was recently sold at Stacks and discussed here: https://forums.collectors.com/discussion/1042194/carved-up-worn-down-common-date-morgan-dollar-auctions-for-19-200-but-it-has-a-bit-of-history. Obviously the coin I'm holding doesn't have the provenance of the New Orleans piece, but are there perhaps other similar pieces that may tell more of the backstory beyond the coin simply being engraved and given from one person to another?
Also, any chance PCGS would grade it First Strike? 
Edit: Fixed the wikipedia links
Comments
Very interesting and unique.
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Very cool coin. It would be quite a coincidence to not be from those gentlemen listed. Hope you find some evidence of written providence.
Jim
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Very cool indeed. "Any chance PCGS would grade it First Strike"? I know you LOL'd to that question, but seriously, there's no way to know when it was engraved. Could've been engraved years after that date, on a dollar picked up at the bank or out of one's pocket. Wouldn't it be nice if a letter between the two mentioning this coin would turn up?
That's pretty darn neat.
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It would seem the engraved names are definitely those politicians (odds of others having the same initials/name and the NY designation of one being astronomical)... However, some confirming communication (perhaps among heirs/descendants) could be pursued. Cheers, RickO
While it's a very cool coin, most any high-schooler in China could duplicate that engraving.....
Neat love token. Like the echo flourishes in the obv. Not seeing a SB Crittenden in family lineage. Genealogy can be an adventure. Peace Roy
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Note that it's SB Chittenden. Crittenden is TT. It took me a lot of double-checking before getting it straight that the last names were different by one letter.
The problem with items like this is that there is no unbroken chain of evidence from their supposed creation to the present. While there is a good chance it is actually from 1878 it would not be hard for a skilled faker of such items to look up some historical names and create fantasy pieces.
I prefer items such as the engraved double eagle that was found with the remains of the commander of the CSS Hunley submarine. Now there is a chain of evidence.
I like it!
What a wonderful Morgan Dollar with such history attached to it. Wish there was a way to prove the engraving was done on the date when it was engraved but alas one cannot do that without another form of proof.
If one of the VAM guys can confirm it’s one of the first varieties, “First Strike” should be a slam dunk!
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Were the two politicians instrumental in the enactment legislation authorizing the re-starting of silver dollar coinage? I know the Bland-Allison act was initially vetoed by President Rutherford B. Hayes, and the veto was overridden by Congress. Were these two perhaps part of the drive for the successful override?
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According to Google, Chittenden was a fierce proponent of "honest" silver coinage and an enemy of the "greenbackers". Crittenden was a Democrat from Missouri who was part of the same delegation as Richard Bland of the Bland-Allison Act. I can't find any tie in to TTC as being instrumental in its passage, but being from the same state and party as Bland I presume he was at least on board.
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I'd poke around (remotely) in any archives that might have the papers from these people. You might get lucky and find a diary or letter that mentions this coin, or at least their shared interest in the Morgan dollar or silver in general.
The bad news is that there is no way without further evidence to prove its provenance.
The good news is that the link between the two men is so obscured by the passage of time that it is unlikely that anyone would have bothered to create a fantasy piece.
Are VAMs known chronologically (apart from a possible case where one VAM leads to another, if that ever happens, such as a die crack on one VAM, and then the same die crack and something else on another)?
I believe that there is a certain VAM number thought to have been the first die pair struck. That said, I would expect that after the ceremonial first strike folderol was over they would have begun running every press capable of striking dollars using other die pairs. So, it could be contemporary to the date shown (which might reflect the presentation date and not the striking date) but be from any number of die pairs.
That said, I like the piece for what it says it is.
The plot thickens, haha. I like this mystery, there's a lot of ins and outs to being able to authenticate it. For instance, the mint is in Phila, and SBC was a congressman from NY (Brooklyn, I believe) who may or may not have been in DC at the time. Or maybe he traveled to Phila for the first strikes of the Morgan dollars and had one engraved there to TTC, but presented it to him later? Or maybe he got several of them and engraved ones to each of the Missouri delegation who supported Bland for the Bland-Allison act? Or maybe he singled out TTC because their names sounded so similar? And who did the engraving? Someone at the mint, or some tradesman on Arch street around the corner?
And then what happened to it over the last 150 years? It obviously wasn't in some display case that preserved its luster. Did TTC use it as a pocket piece? Was it eventually spent and somebody scarfed it up thinking it had to be something special and put it away? We all think about stories that historical coins can tell, but I bet this one has more than most....
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VAM 9 was the first die pair, struck on the afternoon of March 11, but this isn't it. It looks like VAM 14.3, which was one of the proof dies which was later used to make business strikes. Closer inspection of die markers should confirm. VAM 14.8 is the other proof 8TF, and I posted an engraved one of these here a couple years ago, which I think eventually sold to a member here. The production numbers will tell us if there is a problem with this being a real deal. I don't have access to all my stuff right now, but there's a table showing daily production in the VAM book, and I'm pretty sure you can tell what days the proofs were struck. If none were struck until after March 13, then there would seem to be a problem with this being VAM 14.3. It's totally plausible that Chittenden would have had access to a proof coin from the mint the day it was struck. There may be documentation somewhere showing Ch'den acquiring it for Cr'den.
The other interesting bit of engraving (or precision indicental damage) is "PLUPIBUS"
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nm. messy beat me to it.
Some are, sort of. Once upon a time, Pete "Da Nutt" Bishal (Error specialist and "1878-P Nut") had compiled a timetable for the production of all 8TF die pairs. He correctly put VAM 9 first before proving it by having Leroy Van Allen drive him from the Cincinnati ANA show in 1980 to the Hayes museum in Fremont, OH, to meet with the curator who showed them the coin and proved Pete right. There have been more 8TF die pairs listed than what Pete had accounted for, I've demonstrated that the accepted 8TF mintage is about 500,000 low, and there was overlap in production with 7/8 TF and 7TF coinage, so his timetable may be a bit off. Emission sequences are always based on observing die state as dies are swapped out. In some cases, you hit a wall when both dies are changed and you have to start over looking for common dies between die pairs. For the case of the 8TF die marriages (there were 41), the milestones we have are VAM 9 being first, VAM 14.3 being the first proof die pair, and VAM 14.8 being the second. VAMs 21 and 22 were probably the last die pairs, made in early April after some 7/8 TF and 7 TF coins were struck using their obverses.
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PLUPIBUS! lol, that's very interesting too.
Taking a closer look at the lettering of the engraving, doesn't the lettering on the cheek of "to T.T. Crittenden" look a little different than the rest of the lettering? Especially the C and the i? Maybe SBC has several of them engraved on site (with the date) while he was there there, but not personalized? Then later had another engraver personalize this one to TTC and maybe to some other recipients?
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Very cool.
To me, it looks like it was all done by the same very professional hand. (It can't be easy to lay out that many characters so perfectly in such a small space.) And yes, there are some differences in some of the letters, but there are more similarities.
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I'd also add that there may be a difference in the ease or difficulty of engraving based on whether it's a flat surface (the fields) versus the raised cheek, which isn't a perfectly consistent height across the letters. Then again, what do I know? I couldn't write that neatly with a pen and paper on a well-lit desk if my life depended on it.
IMO all engraving done by same hand. And I would like to add that it is done very nicely too.