Gold Dollars Thread for Friday.

Here is nice Type II 1855 gold dollar I spotted at a winter FUN show a couple of years ago. The grade is MS-63, and it's all there for that grade. There are lots of clash marks.

Here's a few from San Francisco...

Bill- You are correct about the 57-C being one of the uglier issues of the series. Here is mine, nicer than usual but has some planchet problems on the right side obverse.

With a mintage of 2,935 coins, the 1854-D gold dollar is scarce, but it's not as rare as Walter Breen said it was back in the '60s when he said there were "possibly 25 or 30 and perhaps less." Doug Winter estimaged the population to be 100 to 125. This one is graded EF-45.

One of Breen's pet theories was the "1% rule." The idea was that roughly 1% of the mintage as survived from the first half of the 19th century unless a hoard had been found. Using Doug Winter's numbers, this coin qualifies for the "4% rule."

I think that more Dahlonega coins survived because the families back then set more of them aside as heirlooms. When I first visited Dahlonega over 10 years ago, the tourist spot places, like the Consolidated Mines mine tour and gold panning operation, had a small selection of Dahlonega coins on display in their sales cases, including a very respectable 1854-D Three Dollar Gold Piece. None of it was for sale. When I went back, no coins were on display, and when I asked the comment was, “The owners took them home years ago.”