For those who follow this blog, they are aware that my favorite coin to collect is the Morgan silver dollar. This began when I inherited several Morgan dollars from the Carson City Mint.
CoinWeek has posted an interesting article on the history of the Morgan silver dollar. Morgans were minted from 1878 to 1921 (with a break of a few years in-between).
Here's some snippets:
Though it might seem to be a modern phenomenon, the problem of dollar coins that don’t circulate has a long history. For the large silver dollars of America’s past, the metal value of these coins often lead to them being melted as bullion rather than being spent as money in everyday commerce.
The first Morgans were produced in 1878. As per the law, millions of silver dollars were minted each year, even though the coin did not circulate widely due to the fact that paper dollars were more convenient. This wasn’t the case everywhere, however; in the American West, silver dollars proved more versatile. Still, the mandated quantities produced each year far outpaced demand and most Morgan dollars were struck, dumped into bags, and put into longterm storage in Treasury vaults.
In 1921, even though millions of the coins could still be found in government vaults, nearly 87 million new Morgan dollars were minted as a stopgap before the legally mandated Peace dollar design could be produced. But the storage of silver dollars was about to end.
A massive run on silver in the 1960s saw the era of face value silver dollars come to a close. The Treasury held back a few million dollar coins that were marked as having been struck at the defunct Carson City Mint and developed a plan to auction them off to the general public through the General Services Administration.
It was this dwindling of the government’s stockpile followed with the public sale of “the coins that Jesse James never got” that ignited a modern collector market for Morgan dollars.
To read the full article, go here.
