San Francisco Mint 112 years ago
EagleEye
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This image was taken by a suspended airship on May 5, 1906. The original image is in my office.
Rick Snow, Eagle Eye Rare Coins, Inc.Check out my new web site:
22
Comments
Great!
RE: "This image was taken by a suspended airship on May 5, 1906. The original is in my office."
How did you get a 110-year old airship into your office? Business must be really good!
Here's a photo (not from an airship) of SF Mint security in 1900. This was prior to racial segregation imposed by Sec William McAdoo in 1913.
L-R.: Guard, Doorman, Conductor.
Guards protected the building during working hours, and night watchmen took over after business hours. Guards and watchmen had keys for various rooms but not for vaults or officers' offices.
The doorman was literally the gatekeeper at each mint. (Denver had a real gate.) He inquired of visitors' business, verified appointments with officers and blocked entrance for anyone he deemed suspicious or inappropriately dressed.
A conductor escorted visitors to the deposit weight room, the cashier or on tours of the facility. At Philadelphia, conductors also took visitors through the Mint Cabinet of Coins, Medals and Ores. San Francisco had a small display of coins and bars relevant to the West.
Cool photos of some major devastation.
Donato
Edited to add: Those are some big doors at the Mint.
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WOW.... Nice photos!!
very cool history.
See, I interpreted @EagleEye's statement to mean he had the original SF mint in his office.
Wonderful photo -- I've never seen it before.
Thanks for posting it!
cool, i love history like that.
Very cool!
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We have a copy of the same photo up in the kitchen at Kagin's. The devastation after the 1906 quake is just unbelievable.
What is now proved was once only imagined. - William Blake
Here's the telegram sent by Frank Leach to Mint HQ.
[RG104 E-229 Box 244 SF]
PS: The OP's lower photo was cropped from the panorama negative of the upper photo.
Yes, It is probably from Jim Cauley of Errors and More. He sold me this original and was selling copies made from it at the Las Vegas show.
RE: "We have a copy of the same photo up in the kitchen at Kagin's."
Is that a subtle reminder to Kagin's staff about their cooking habits?
If you only knew. I kid you not, it can be dangerous in there.
What is now proved was once only imagined. - William Blake
Fantastic images. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Dealing in Canadian and American coins and historical medals.
Superb thread. Forum at its very best.
I remember when the old mint museum was still open they had a small stack of silver coinage that had been fused together during the fire.
My second great grandmother lived in SF during the earthquake, just having moved there from Utah. Her home made it through the earthquake just fine - but the fire was another story. Sometime when I get to the safe deposit box I will take and post a picture of the gold Southern Pacific pocket watch that was burned in the fire.
I have read that the 1916 Pan-Pacific Exposition was an announcement that the San Francisco area was back from the earthquake. This picture shows how far they had to come.
Fantastic photo, thread, comments all. I've heard about the Granite Lady being nearly the lone survivor but the pic says it all, and the Leach letter says it didn't come easy at all. Full force of the government defending the mint did it.
Also of interest was the statement about the "small display of coins and bars relevant to the West". I always enjoy the SF mint museum display when I visit...I wonder how much of what's there now was there then...
http://macrocoins.com
A kitchen in a coin shop? Do you cook food or coins?
RE: ".I wonder how much of what's there now was there then..."
None of it. The SF Mint display was removed once public tours were stopped in 1923. Most ended up in the Smithsonian Collection and at the FRB of San Francisco.
I haven't yet toured the FRB in SF, it's on my bucket list. I have toured 7 of the 12.
Well, I've toured the Granite Lady several times since the 70's, and latest a few years ago, and indeed there is an impressive museum with coins and bars and such, with many private gold coins, etc. I remember as a kid seeing the stack of gold bars (the "1M dollar display") in one of the old vaults.
http://macrocoins.com
I wonder what the lifespan of tethered airship photographers was back then! That job sounds terrifying.
Interesting photos! My late grandmother lived in the Bay area at the time of the shaker.
She was just a little girl and her family was in the shipping business. They spent some time on
a vessel in the Bay and watched SF burn. I am a third generation CA native. The "name"
of Captain Blunt is not a drug reference. Blunt was the last name of the captain of the Winfield
Scott that wrecked on Anacapa Island in December of 1853 with a load of gold dust and
some Cal fractionals, etc....
I love interesting threads like this. The pictures are just incredible.
This is on my bucket list to visit all 12 FRB's plus the 2 BEP's. I've been to Chicago's FRB twice. Once wen they gave tours up inside where they have the counting machines. They don't let the public up there anymore.
Later, Paul.
Cool history.
The earth looks pretty flat in those photos. Maybe it is.......
Gold Delivery - Coiners Book from the SF Mint that was put into use just after the big quake in 1906. Along with the SF Mint Assay book from the late 1890's (obscured, bottom)
@EagleEye ...Great picture and the devastation is incredible. In person, it is always much more of a shock. I have gone through areas hit by tornado and hurricane.... The pictures we see on TV just cannot compare to the impact of reality. Cheers, RickO
Those two volumes look "too good to be true."
Great pics!!
Wow, thanks for posting such a great historical photo.
I knew it would happen.
Indeed, thanks for posting !
@RogerB How so?
The bindings look new. 100-year old government leather does not look like that. The gold lettering is perfect - also not typical of something from 1906. Also, NARA did not, so far as I am aware, ever rebind old documents in leather. The material requires regular care to prevent drying, cracking and eventual deterioration into orange dust. It also out-gasses which can damage paper.
Lastly, no one would be permitted to take slabbed coins into a NARA facility, or remove volumes from a NARA facility. Thus, the photo is almost certainly a studio recreation.
Roger those could have been custom bound at the time or later. They also could have come from the private libraries of mint officials. I wouldn't automatically dismiss them. Many/most numismatists back then used custom binderies.
I can only trust what I've seen of legitimate contemporary document bindings. 100-year old leather does not look like that. Mint officials did not re-bind volumes. Binding was done soon after the volume was complete and that was the end of it. If US Mint volumes were taken out of the San Francisco Mint and not returned, then they were either stolen or legitimately recovered from discarded documents.
Further, there is no "Gold Delivery Book - Coiner" shown on either the current San Francisco Mint document inventory, or the 1940 original inventory (excerpt below).
Until shown otherwise, I have to consider the volumes in the photo fake.
Can you point me toward the source of the photo or the owner of the volumes?
Very historical pictures seeing just how devastating the earthquake and fire were. The old granite lady was right in the middle of it and lived to tell the tale.
Thanks for posting the pictures Rick.
Thanks for posting the telegram. It is very insightful and helps explain why the mint building seems to stand out alone as an oasis amid the photographed destruction.
For those who have found this thread of interest, the photos relating to the 1916 Pan-Pacific Exposition as posted on the below linked thread may also be found to be of added historical significance:
https://forums.collectors.com/discussion/comment/11959097#Comment_11959097
@RogerB
https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/periodical/13164
http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v14n13a09.html
https://holabirdamericana.liveauctiongroup.com/SF-Mint-Gold-Bullion-Deposit-Book_i21871787
These are the books in question.
Thanks for providing the information and helping satisfy my skeptical questions.
Checking the 2011 photos, the covers have wear consistent with their date, and the entries are correct for what was actually the "Coiner's Record of Receipt and Delivery." The spine, as shown in the posted photos, is almost perfect - very unusual, but apparently authentic. It would be nice if the present owner would allow the volume to be digitized and then added to the NNP database.
The volume itself, had to have been removed from the San Francisco Mint's holdings. When this was done it is impossible to tell. There are many other US Mint materials with a similar unknown status. My view is that they are legal to own, unless the Mint Bureau can conclusively establish when and how they were removed.
This volume was at the Archives in SF in the 1970's. It was removed by the Government in a disposal effort
that took place in 1982. Someone must have fished it out of the trash. Many other volumes were also
disposed of.
Ahhhh....Now this makes sense. It must have been at the SF Mint. NARA would not have disposed of it. Later regulations required extensive NARA review before these could be discarded, but in the 1970s that was not the case.
If more of these are known, I'd like to hear from the owners so they can be digitized. No cost to the owners.
The records were deemed to have no intrinsic value...
An Archivist of the U.S. signed off on the order to dispose of the volumes
J.J. Ford Jr. was extremely interested in one missing volume in particular.
He stated that it showed that a San Francisco madam by the name of Mrs. John
Keenan had received eleven gold bars from the S.F. Branch Mint prior to boarding
what would become the Brother Jonathan's final voyage up the coast.
He stated he saw it in 1971, but it was now missing circa the late 1990's.
I did not find the volume on the disposal list nor at the Archives.
J.J. Ford Jr. then made an effort to contact book sellers in the SF area hoping it would turn up there
but in the end it did not matter. The volume in question would not have proven the
authenticity of the so called eleven 1865 S.F. Mint S.S. Brother Jonathan gold bars...
I think one of the salvors of the wreck pictured some of the bars on a brochure
stating that there was more gold like this waiting to be found on the wreck.
There were all fake....the 1865 SF Mint gold bars....not the coins of course
@RogerB
I took that picture and purposely cropped the areas where you would see wear and some water damage on the cover. No Photoshop or other edits were done to the image. It was also taken with a smartphone.
The story is that the mint threw out most of the documents and ledgers back in the 70's. Somebody went dumpster diving, or rumored to, and saved these from the dump. Several have come up for auction over the years from San Francisco and the Carson City Mint.
I've always had an interest in the San Francisco Mint and the California Gold Rush, having ancestors in California dating back to the beginning 1849. It is truly sad that the Granite Lady continues to sit in disarray and the city of San Francisco doesn't have interest in making it a priority. Hopefully that changes soon.
In the meantime, many collectors continue to be the custodians of such documents that sooner or later end up coming up for sale again or donated to a proper museum for display.
I did attend a couple of coin shows that were held in the Old Mint building, and they were some of my favorite coin shows of all time. Great setting for such an event. Not sure when the last one was...
http://macrocoins.com
Thanks for the information. I'd be pleased to digitize any that might turn up.