1838 cracked die seated dime

fishteeth

Going through a box of coins that came home for a visit from the SDB and noticed this dime. Is this the coin from the die
that eventually cracked to form the pie shape crack in 1838? EDIT to say it looks like the 1839 dime had the PIE shape crack

Crack goes from between star 5-6 right through seated liberty to the 1 in the date, completely bisects the coin

STONE

Where's SeatedDime when you need him

That's a pretty cool crack, and I was thinking, before I saw what your wrote, that it resembled the Pie-Crack coin.

LanLord

I think I have one of those somewhere.

I'll have to do some digging to see if I can find it.

seateddime

Of the several cracked dies for the 38 coins this one is somewhat common. Still it should be bring a nice premium and it is a cool looking coin.

seateddime

Quarternut

There are several seated dime die marriages found for 1838 that have substantial obverse die cracks. Most of these have a die crack from the rim, by star-7, down into the portrait.

Only one of these varieties with obverse die cracks was listed in the Encyclopedia of United States Liberty Seated Dimes 1837 - 1891, written by Kamal Ahwash in 1977 and updated in 1981.

Kam listed it as: Large Stars (die crack thru obverse), Obverse-5 / Reverse-5. This is the same variety as the one posted by the OP.

In The Complete Guide to Liberty Seated Dimes, written by Brian Greer in 1992, Brian lists 3 varieties with obverse die breaks and lists the one corrosponding to the Ahwash Obv-5 / Rev-5 as #103 (the picture in the book however is wrong and has the listing as #105 due to the pictures being reversed during printing).

Jerry Fortin's Seated Dime Web Book has the variety listed as #106 and here is a link to the attribution page for it: Link

The two pictures that Jason has posted are not the same variety as the one in the OP, but represent two others found for 1838.

QN

NHSBaseball

Those are all really cool dimes that have been posted. I love the "pie" die cracks and find it a little odd that so many (relatively speaking) were produced and have survived before they changed the dies.

It really makes you think about the pressure and challenges that the mint workers at the time were under to produce coinage. The huge numbers of die cracks, chips, cuds, repunched stars, letters, and dates- etc. are one of the main things that attracted me to collect CBHD's. I could easily see myself getting hooked on the early Seated stuff as well one day (maybe after I hit the lotto).

You always post interesting coins, Fishteeth.