Question About Mintages

TigersFan2

I've been wondering about this for a long time. When I look at the mintages of coins in Red Book, I see that most mintages are what I assume rounded to the nearest thousand.

Take for example Barber Quarters (but almost any denomination will do). Almost all of them have mintages ending in 000.

1907 = 7,132,000
1907-D = 2,484,000
1907-O = 4,560,000
1907-S = 1,360,000

But there in the middle of all these mintages are these exceptions...

1904 = 9,588,143
1905 = 4,967,523
1914 = 6,244,230

I'm assuming that for the most part, the Mint just rounded to the nearest thousand. I can't believe they purposely stopped minting at full increments of 1,000. Yet some years they apparently counted to the exact coin. Yet, given that it's the country's money supply, I'd expect they'd want an exact count and not a rough estimate to the nearest thousand.

Bob1951

The mint back then had very exacting standards. They most likely were told to produce so many coins and that is what they did. The mintages could be a few coins off but I doubt very many. They had to account for every coin. Total mintages includes Proofs. If you notice most of the Philadelpia mintages are not ending in 000 in the years that proof coins were minted. If you subtract out the number of proof coins minted then a lot of times it will end in 000. Of course there are exceptions, as in everything. There could be a variety of reasons for mintages not ending in 000. Like a disaster occured or the dies wore out and they were close to whatever they were authorized to produce, or a zillion other reasons but for the most part they are pretty accurate for that time frame.



There could also be errors in simply the transcription of numbers minted from one sheet of paper to another.



There are some mintage records that are known to be inaccurate such as the 1877 twenty cent piece. There are many more of these known to exist then the supposed mintage of 350 coins. There is no seperate mintage record for the 1849-O seated liberty quarter but they exist with the mintage included in with the 1850-O.



Bob

Tibor

It might be possible that the some coins went to the Assay Commission.
I could be wrong so please correct me if I am wrong.

COALPORTER

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COALPORTER

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Nysoto

A comprehensive answer to your question, for the time period you indicated, was given by numismatic researcher and author Roger Burdette on the NGC forum Mintages of US Coins by RWB on NGC Forum

For silver and gold coins minted prior to 1837, the quantity of coins minted was based directly on the amount of silver and gold deposited by customers for coinage, usually banks. The reported "mintage" figures during these years in numismatic publications is the summation of deliveries for denominations during a given year, which does not always correspond to the date on the coins (example - the reported delivery of dollars in 1804 was 1803 dated dollars).

More research is currently being done that aligns depositors to deliveries for early US coins, published in the John Reich Journal, and the weekly e-letter for the JRCS, the JR News.

ricko

Since it is generally known and accepted that many coins/errors were produced and spirited out of the mint many, many times, and the fact that some dates were produced at different times than marked - or included with other mintages, I would say that published mintages, of any specific type, are to be taken as a general figure and accuracy is not their goal. Cheers, RickO