Owner Comments:
Collectors owe a debt of gratitude to the General Services Administration sales of the 1970s (ended in 1980) for the dispersal of millions of Mint State CC-mint Morgan dollars. When the price of silver began to rise and silver dollars became worth more than their melt value, the Treasury ceased payments of silver dollars in March 1964. As the Bowers-Borckardt Silver Dollar Encyclopedia explains, although the Carson City Mint had ceased coinage in 1893, it continued to store many millions of CC Morgans until 1899, when about 5 million coins were transferred--mostly to Treasury vaults in Washington, D.C., with some others going to the San Francisco Mint.
All of those CC-mint dollars were promptly forgotten, for decades.
Collector interest in mintmarked coins was spurred, coincidentally, in 1893 by the publication of a small pamphlet by Augustus Heaton called Mint Marks. The book listed "causes of attractiveness" of various mintmarked coins, forever altering the landscape of U.S. numismatics. Collectors became accustomed to collecting coins according to whether they had an S for San Francisco, a D for Dahlonega (and later Denver), a CC, an O for New Orleans, or a C for Charlotte. (Other mint marks--W for West Point, and P for Philadelphia--were many years in the future.)
In the quarter-century from 1910-1935, when the Peace dollar series ended, collector interest had increased in collecting Morgan dollars by mintmark. In the 1940s and 1950s, some dealers obtained quantities of various CC-mintmarked dollars at face value, making a good living reselling the nice ones. (The smallest quantities were those for 1879, 1889, and 1893, presaging the current market conditions of today.) When the Treasury stopped silver dollar payouts in 1964, many thousands of CC Morgan dollars dated from 1880 through 1885, in particular, remained. (The history of the Morgan dollars from four mints over a period of 90 years is a complex one; see Bowers for much more information.)
Of the original mintage of 1,133,000 1882-CC silver dollars, the General Services Administration still held more than 605,000 coins, or about 53.4% of that total.