First cleaned GSA I've ever seen...
AUandAG
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I've seen fingerprints, issues, etc, but never a cleaned coin in an UNC holder. Always something to learn. Wonder if it was a grading error.
bob 
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/115917813684?
Registry: CC lowballs (boblindstrom), bobinvegas1989@yahoo.com
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How hard is it to open those GSA slabs? Were they sonically sealed?
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"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
It's possible it's a grading error. It's also possible that it looks like it was wiped before being placed in the gsa holder. I can't tell from the pics though.
I don't know, never tried to open one.
bob
vegas baby!
Except the GSA didn't do that. If they did, a TON of coins would have been wiped back then.
Then it must be a grading error
Must have been wiped with something - the top portion of the rim looks discolored.
"When they can't find anything wrong with you, they create it!"
It's certainly possible that someone wiped one without it being standard practice. This could occur either in packaging the GSA cases or when it was minted 140 years ago.
The eBay images are pretty good and it appears it may have been dipped at one time. I don't see any obvious signs of a cleaning.
Do remember, the grading was not done by numismatists, but rather by a group of government clerks who received maybe half a day of "training". I'd believe one coin was a little messy and somebody cleaned it with a shirt tail, just like they cleaned their glasses.
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Well, I guess anything is possible if the coin circulated before it found its way into the Treasury vault before being part of the GSA hoard. But, there were no contemporaneous reports of coins being cleaned, wiped, treated, etc. before being encased in preparation for the sale. And, if they were in fact so treated, there would literally be hundreds of thousands of them. Not one.
And I wouldn't. They were being sorted -- circulated and uncirculated, based not only on wear, but on discoloration, since the clerks really had no idea what they were doing. To think a minimum wage clerk doing sorting would care enough to take the time to wipe anything is a stretch I am not willing to make, although I was not there and therefore could not swear on a stack of bibles that it didn't happen.
If it's not a grading error, then my best guess would be that it was cleaned when it circulated over 100 years ago, before finding its way back to the Treasury, and then somehow did not retone over the intervening decades before going into a GSA holder.
Again, if they cleaned one, they cleaned thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of the millions they sold. And, all these years later, there is absolutely zero evidence of that. They sold plenty of ratty looking coins in blue packs. They didn't clean any of them.
I don't think it was a grading error.
See here: https://coins.ha.com/itm/gsa-dollars/1883-cc-1-gsa-reverse-cleaned-anacs-ms60-details-mintage-1-204-000-from-the-pasadena-collection/a/132328-23693.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515
And here: https://coins.ha.com/itm/gsa-dollars/1883-o-1-gsa-soft-pack-obverse-cleaned-ngc-details-mintage-8-725-000-pcgs-524966-/a/60189-92316.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515
And here: https://coins.ha.com/itm/gsa-dollars/1883-cc-1-cleaned-anacs-ms60-details-ngc-census-0-0-pcgs-population-0-0-pcgs-42153-/a/131631-21644.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515
And here: https://coins.ha.com/itm/gsa-dollars/1879-cc-1-reverse-cleaned-uncertified-ms60-details-pcgs-518848-/a/1122-2299.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
@MFeld
Mark I did not see that 79cc, so this would be the second in an UNC holder.
two of the others are not in UNC holders and the third is a soft pack (plenty of circulated examples in that release).
So, even if there are now two, it would still be a scarce bird for sure.
bob
vegas, baby!
Agreed. But, it's more than none or one. There is no way it was a government thing, or there would be zillions of them.
That leaves the fact that we know they did not all go directly from the Mint to Treasury vaults to GSA holders, so some of those that escaped into the public for a period of time between minting and GSA were cleaned before finding their way back to the Treasury.
I have nothing to say about any of the coins shown. I just wish to mention an old true story about one of the Treasury’s many silver dollar storage vaults leaking rain water that went unnoticed until the canvas bags rotted and thousands of coins spilled out onto the concrete floor.
When the damage was discovered the coins were scooped up with flat bottom coal shovels and recounted and rebagged and once again became part of the silver dollar reserves. Perhaps some of these damaged coins ended up in the GSA holdings. I don’t know.
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I find it hard NOT TO BELIEVE that some of the coins in the GSA Sales weren't wiped in some fashion.
No one answered my question above. If the GSA slabs can be opened, I can see some less than ethical persons removing a nice coin and substituting a lightly cleaned mint state silver dollar in the hopes that it will "fly under the radar" so to speak in the GSA slab when submitted for grading.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
Personally i'm glad nobody answered your question. That means that the members here have not tried it and so can't comment.
bob
vegas baby!
Honest question I don't know the answer to: What percentage of GSA dollars have been to a TPG?
Very interesting. I had not considered that. I wonder how many people are sitting on unopened shipments of these and inside are cleaned coins? Did think of that possibility.
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@PerryHall said: How hard is it to open those GSA slabs? Were they sonically sealed?
....................No one answered my question above. If the GSA slabs can be opened, I can see some less than ethical persons removing a nice coin and substituting a lightly cleaned mint state silver dollar in the hopes that it will "fly under the radar" so to speak in the GSA slab when submitted for grading.
While I can't say with certainty how they were sealed it seems that they were sonically sealed. The question of cracking open those cases isn't the important one, the real problem is how to seal them again once they're opened. Risking being viewed as a bad person, I will say that I have cracked open similar cases, 1981 Proof Sets, to remove the dollar. It is very, very difficult to open them without some telltale sign along the seam. Then it is nearly impossible to reclose the case and not leave signs of that having been done. The simple answer might seem to be super-glue, but that will tone the coins in a noticeable fashion over time and leave the case area, where glue was used, cloudy.
I would think that cracking one of these open would require great care with the seam and then a sonic sealer to duplicate what the case looked like when initially sealed. For these reasons I don't believe these "one-off" GSA Dollars that are graded as Cleaned have been switched. Occam's Razor applies here and they were simply wiped prior to the sale by an in-experienced government employee who thought they were helping.
I suppose its possible to fake a gsa slab, graders might not catch that. Then put a real coin in it..
I think that’s an extreme long shot, especially considering the low payoff and the slim chances of all of those things happening.
Mark Feld* of Heritage Auctions*Unless otherwise noted, my posts here represent my personal opinions.
On a side note, I wonder how many coins were put into the uncirculated GSA holders and were later graded as AU. I have an example of one that was put into just the "Silver Dollar" type holder and is graded MS64.
I do not either.
@VanHalen said: The eBay images are pretty good and it appears it may have been dipped at one time. I don't see any obvious signs of a cleaning.
I disagree, the images aren't nearly good enough to make either of those determinations. The graders at PCGS/NGC see enough of these to know what they're looking for. I'd trust their judgement that in-hand there are clear signs of a cleaning of some sort.
10's of thousands of each of the 81-85CC's have been graded at NGC and PCGS and the numbers are out there. Some are graded in the hard pack and others carry the "GSA" designation. I have never attempted to crack out a GSA hard pack. At one point in time it was very common to crack out the coins for grading before NGC and PCGS came up with specific"GSA" designated holders.
I would suspect a close inspection of a holder that was "reassembled" could be fairly easily discernible.
I also suspect a small number got "wiped" for one reason or another before being encased for by government employees who had absolutely no coin experience. Remember these coins sat around for decades in treasury vaults prior to the sale. The story repeated above by @CaptHenway could very well be true of otherwise uncirculated Morgan CC's.
Mark
I kind of think as Joe does, a small percentage of GSA coins for sure... I've handled and owned a bunch of them.
Mark
Another possibility is that a light wheel mark could have been flagged as cleaning instead.
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It didn't have to circulate to be wiped. It is not unheard of for Mint workers to wipe grease or other dirt from freshly minted coins.
I guess. There are more reports of this than I realized, although I seriously doubt that happened in the 1880s, or that that would be flagged as cleaning by a TPG in 2023.
More likely that someone cleaned the coin sometime in the 1930s, 40s or 50s before it was turned into a bank, and then sat in a Treasury vault until it made its way into a GSA holder in the 1970s.
If they left hairlines, they would be.
True. It's just hard for me to picture Mint workers in Carson City in the 1880s wiping anything off any coin, with a view towards it being pretty before going into a teller's drawer in the Wild West.
They weren't trying to make it pretty, just clean. I doubt they rubbed them all, but if you've got a particularly greasy one, it would make a mess and stick to other coins.
@NJCoin said: More likely that someone cleaned the coin sometime in the 1930s, 40s or 50s before it was turned into a bank, and then sat in a Treasury vault until it made its way into a GSA holder in the 1970s.
Are you suggesting that this 1882-CC was in general circulation, worked its way back to the US Treasury where it was bagged, stored in a vault and then released in the GSA sales?? Maybe I'm wrong, but it has always been my understanding that the GSA Hoard were coins from Carson City Mint bags stored in Treasury vaults, not coins taken from general circulation and re-bagged.
Sure. Because back in the 1880s, in the Wild West, factory workers were worrying about the aesthetics of pocket change that was being thrown into burlap bags before being shipped off to banks.
If you say so. I wasn't there, so I can't say for sure one way or the other.
I just find it hard to envision, given how many pristine examples have been put aside relative to their mintage. I'm thinking collectors polished them up over the years, and a few of them apparently found their way back into Treasury vaults before being placed into GSA holders, rather than Mint workers giving them a good scrubbing before carelessly tossing them onto trains 140 years ago.
Don't have time to read the whole thread right now because I'm about to go to bed, but my understanding on the handling of the GSA hoard is professional numismatists weren't really involved initially, it wasn't until they were a few days in that professionals got involved and trained the (mostly) college interns handling the coins. Stories of them using coin counters and wheel marking some of the coins prior to the professionals getting involved are around. Not shocking, that being the case, that some were messed with prior to encapsulation.
Pretty sure that story was linked and discussed on this forum many years ago.
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If it was cleaned, yes. The coins came from Treasury vaults, and many of them never saw the light of day between being minted and sold in that sale.
But PLENTY of coins in those vaults were indeed returned by banks in the preceding 70 years, which is why many of them ended up in soft packs in clearly circulated condition. There were undoubtedly many tens or hundreds of thousands, out of the millions sold in hard packs, that would grade MS 60 or better that spent at least a little time out of a Treasury bag before finding their way back to the vaults.
My speculation is that was when they were cleaned. Not on a spot basis by a hyper-vigilant Mint worker going above and beyond the call of duty to clean circulating coinage on its way to a bank. When has that EVER been a thing? With any denomination? EVER?
That’s as rare as a GSA 1893-CC
They do it now. Again, they aren't making it pretty, just wiping off grease or grime.
And you keep making it sound like they cleaned them all. We're taking about one coin that could have gotten a wipe because it was covered in grease. Or it was dropped in the floor and wiped when they picked it up.
I think you're conflating two different hoards. The CC dollars were allegedly bags that had never been distributed. The GSA dollars are ALL CCs.
The soft packs were mixed Mint marks and mixed grades.
It was always a thing, especially before automation.
That's a pretty good image and here's the full size: pcgs.com/cert/47661495
It's easy to see the vertical lines in the GSA holder. Harder to see an obvious cleaning.
If that was my submission I would not be too happy.
It was a much more hand on job in the 19th century. You might just wipe the grease of a coin to keep from getting out all over yourself. It has NOTHING to do with being "pretty".
Feel free to do some research on your own. I don't have time to do it for you.
I've seen worse MS60 coins. Besides all the hands-on steps in the process, that coin could have been in contact with the mint bag and thrown around scraping the coin from top to bottom. I also lean towards those marks coming from the mint/Treasury process and not from being circulated, returned and rebagged.
I opened some by putting a screwdriver to where the slab was put together and tapping it with a hammer. Don't plan on putting the coin back in the slab.
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And you don't think that PCGS would spot that? lol
bob
vegas baby.
And no the coin was not wiped at the mint.
I've seen one that just popped open on its own.
Unless you did it yourself, really no way to know.