Evolution of the Small US One Cent Piece

This set represents patterns that I have assembled to outline the roadmap taken by the mint in this transition to a Small US Cent - a sample of the experiment pieces and designs from 1850 – 1856.

The mint initiated trials when the Mint Director was informed that congress was going to put forward a bill to reduce the size of the One Cent piece that had grown out of favor do to its bulkiness, cost of production and large copper pieces were a lost to the mint .

The 1st trials in 1850 were Ring Form pieces struck in Silver(10%)-Copper (90%). This composition (Billion) had a higher intrinsic value than pure copper. The thought process of trying not to make the cents too small was to have a center perforation that would afford an increase of the physical diameter of this Cent without the need to reducing the thickness. The J-119 pattern also carried the label “ONE TENTH SILVER”. My J-124 is also an example of this pieces but without the center perforation (this is a restrike).

Trials continued in 1851 with several compositions and my J-127 represents one of these Billion pieces. Note these patterns are all dateless examples. The mint was going to abandon this approach as the perforation proved difficult in the minting and also the fact that the Billion proved too expensive to extract the silver when these pieces were reclaimed.

J-151 represent the mint continuation of trials with smaller cents in 1853, even after the use of Billion was dropped and perforations abandoned. Several German Silver (Copper, Zinc and Nickel but no silver) compositions were deployed. This composition was 1st proposed by Feushtwanger in 1837. Since Pollock believed these 1851 Patterns cannot be distinguish without metallurgical analysis, Andrew Pollock only assign a single number (P-178) in his reference book verses Judd’s J-149 through J-151.

The 1854 Cent Patterns.

The J-156 to J-159a represent pieces that were the result of the mint experiments with German silver and Nickel compositions. They were not meant to be a proof of designs rather experiments in striking different compositions. The dies for the patterns are quite interesting as they were cruelly made by scaling down the obverse of the 1854 Silver Dollar using a lathe. The concentric circles on Liberty Seated obverse and the missing crossbar on the 4 yields a piece that looks like it is dated 1851.

Several other patterns were struck on copper and bronze planchet considerable smaller than current Large Cent pieces in production, Mint Director Snowden thought they might be accepted by the public.

J-160/161 is a smaller diameter (size) Braided Hair design but without stars and a new style Flying Eagle (J-163/164) inspired by the Gobrecht’s 1838 half dollar were struck. Samples of the flying eagle were struck again in 1855 in various metal compositions..

THE 1856 FLYING EAGLE

Finally the Mint committed to find a replacement for the Large Copper One Cents and this evolved into the Small Flying Eagle cent with Gobrecht's inspiration Eagle and Longacre’s earlier design for the reverse. While the 1856 was considered a pattern, due to their popularly – the mint made a large number of restrikes as late as 1859 and they have been collected as part of the RED Book Flying Eagle series.

Note: If any information above is in error, Please feel free to reach out to me via the NGC Site.


Click below link to Return to Mania's Master Pattern Registry
Mania's US Patterns- WHAT U.S. COINAGE COULD HAVE BEEN

===============================================================