Owner Comments:
Mintage: 204,691
This was the 2nd coin purchased for this set, bought on May 24th, 2009, just 2 days after the 1875 was purchased. The 1875 was acquired on a Friday and I bought this on a Sunday, before I even had the 1875 physically in my possession! that seems almost insanely impulsive and impatient, but I was 22 and I do tend to go a little nuts sometimes racing off on collecting tangents.
I think I got into my head almost immediately to not stop at just one or two coins but to try to aggressively build this set and make it as complete as possible given that I already knew going in that the dates in the 1880s were rare and would be hard to find. I knew I could find and get all the common dates though: The 1875, 1876, 1877, 1879, and 1889. Even if I couldn't get all or any of the rarer years that would give me 5 of the 10 years of issue and fill 5 of the 11 slots, and that seemed like it would be solid and respectable in its own right to me - at the time especially. It also seemed likely even at the time that doing so would give me a solid ranking in the registry category. Maybe not #1, but a solid ranking and a set that I could be quite proud of.
Picking this coin up gave me the first and last coins in the series with very solid grades of MS66 or better. I decided pretty early on to go for at least MS65 and MS66 if I could get them for the more common years because they were selling in those grades with premiums that were usually only about 20-30% over spot gold, not really all that much, and well worth the marginal increase over the MS64s and lower examples to go ahead and get really solid grades.
Last Rev: 09/2019