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Pedigree Questions on the 1866 No Motto Dollars

ZoinsZoins Posts: 34,318 ✭✭✭✭✭
edited January 1, 2024 3:07PM in U.S. Coin Forum

I was recently looking up the pedigrees for the 1866 No Motto Dollar and found something interesting.

HA indicates the specimen owned by Virgil Brand ended up in the Smithsonian, however, USPatterns.com (aka Judd), indicates that the Virgil Brand specimen is the Simpson specimen.

The relationship with Brand, Farouk and Simpson are interesting for the two sets of pedigrees:

Heritage: The Simpson coin is the Farouk coin and not the Brand coin.

  • Specimen 1: Brand-Smithsonian
  • Specimen 2: Farouk-Simpson

USPatterns: The Simpson coin is the rand coin and not the Farouk coin.

  • Specimen 1: Brand-Simpson
  • Specimen 2: Davis-Farouk

So is the Simpson coin the Brand coin or the Farouk coin? Can we figure this out?

Heritage reference: https://coins.ha.com/itm/proof-seated-dollars/1866-1-no-motto-pr63-pcgs-cac-judd-540-pollock-605-r8-pcgs-7009-/a/1329-4149.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515

Heritage said:

  1. PR65 Deep Cameo PCGS. Philadelphia Mint official (possibly Chief Coiner, and later Superintendent, A. Loudon Snowden) sometime during, or after 1866; Robert Coulton Davis, part of a set with the No Motto quarter and half dollar, before 1885; Davis Estate; anecdotal evidence suggests the dollar passed to dealer John W. Haseltine, while the half dollar and quarter were sold in lots 709 and 1469 of the R.C. Davis Collection (New York Coin & Stamp, 1/1890) respectively, breaking the set; S.H. & H. Chapman sold the dollar to Virgil Brand on April 22, 1899 for $100 (Brand Journal number 20657); Brand Estate; F.C.C. Boyd; Boyd Estate; Abe Kosoff; Lammot duPont; Willis duPont (who purchased the No Motto quarter and half dollar at Kosoff's Hydeman sale in 1961 to reunite the original set); stolen, along with the rest of duPont's collection, in October 1967; the quarter and half dollar were recovered circa December 1999 and the dollar was recovered in 2004; the coins were exhibited at the ANA Money Museum until November 2014, when they were donated to the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian Institution.

  2. PR63+ PCGS. CAC. Philadelphia Mint official (possibly Chief Coiner, and later Superintendent, A. Loudon Snowden) sometime during, or after 1866; possibly given to William H. Woodin as partial compensation for the two 1877 half union patterns he purchased from John W. Haseltine and Stephen Nagy, circa 1910 (per the article in The Numismatist, February 1975 edition), Woodin may have been the buyer of the quarter and half dollar in the 1890 Davis sale (see number 1 above), or he may have acquired the coins at a later time, either way he combined those coins with this second dollar to form another set; listed in the Adams-Woodin pattern reference, but mistakenly estimated as R.6 on their scale (meaning 36-50 specimens known); H.O. Granberg, who exhibited the set at the 1914 ANS Exhibition; Granberg offered the quarter in lot 642 of the catalog of his collection, called the Collection of a Prominent American (United States Coin Company, 5/1915), and all three coins ended up with Wayte Raymond, who was a principle of the United States Coin Company; the set passed to F.C.C. Boyd; "Colonel" E.H.R. Green; Green Estate; the partnership of B.G. Johnson and Eric P. Newman; F.C.C. Boyd purchased all three coins again, per invoices from B.G. Johnson (the half dollar on 8/5/1942 for $125, the dollar on 1/3/1943 for $400, and the quarter on 4/9/1943 for $325); King Farouk; Palace Collections of Egypt (Sotheby's, 2/1954), with the dollar in lot 1797 and the quarter and half dollar in lot 1798; Sol Kaplan and Abe Kosoff; the dollar was sold to Ben Koenig, owner of the Fairbanks Collection, and Kosoff offered the quarter and half dollar in his sale of the Edwin M. Hydeman Collection (3/1961), in lots 1107 and 1108, where they were purchased by Willis duPont, reuniting them with the Davis dollar for the first time since 1890 (see number 1 above); Fairbanks Collection (Stack's, 12/1960), lot 611; Samuel Wolfson Collection (Stack's, 5/1963), lot 1425; Charles Jay Collection (Stack's, 10/1967), lot 182; Winner Delp Collection (Stack's, 11/1972), lot 91; A-Mark; New England Rare Coin Galleries; Texas Collection; Classics Sale (American Numismatic Rarities, 9/2003), lot 31; Kennywood Collection (American Numismatic Rarities, 1/2005), lot 689, realized $1,207,500; Simpson Collection. The present coin.

This is the Simpson specimen:

USPatterns reference: https://uspatterns.store.turbify.net/j540p605.html

USPatterns.com said:

  1. The example illustrated above is supposedly the one that was purchased by Virgil Brand from the Chapman brothers on April 22, 1899 for $100.00 and was entered into the Brand journals as #20657 and apparently was offered in Stack's Fairbanks, Wolfson, Jay and Delp sales prior to its recent appearances in American Numismatic Rarity's 9/03 and 1/05 sales where it sold for $1,207,500 becoming just the second individual pattern coin to sell for over one million dollars to Simpson-Heritage 4/21 - PCGS63 if the Breen pedigrees are correct.

  2. The other is the original Davis example which supposedly went to Granberg (possibly via Dewitt Smith), Boyd and Farouk along with the quarter and half dollar. This set was stolen in 1967 from the duPont family. The quarter and half dollar were recovered circa december 1999 and the dollar was recovered in early 2004 with the help of American Numismatic Rarities. It is illustrated below.

This is the image of the Brand-Simpson coin from USPatterns:

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