Owner Comments:
Mintage: 1,581,106
This was the 4th coin purchased for the set, and it came just 9 days after the third, the 1879.
All four of these coins, the 1875, the 1889, the 1879, and the 1876, dropped into the registry set together when I first registered the set on 6/16/2009. I couldn't have even received this coin in the mail yet. It was added to the set the same day I bought/won it, so I must have pulled the cert# from the pictures in the eBay post. I can't help but chuckle looking back at my haste to "plant a flag" or some such nonsense and show-off the set I'd started to build.
In one move I moved into the #2 place in the category with designs on picking up an 1877 and moving into the #1 spot as soon as I could. I think I was hoping to move the set into the #1 spot in time for the December deadline for the 2009 awards. Things, of course, didn't work out that way.
Looking back at it, I can't help but shake my head at how impatient I was at the time to build this set. My wife sometimes jokingly calls me obsessed, but back then in that now long-ago summer this set certainly was my obsession.
I picked up 4 coins for it in less than a month, but there would not be another coin acquired for the set for 7 years.
I started this set right as a series of major changes were about to happen in my life. I was about to finish my undergraduate college career - which I did in December 2009 just 6 months later. It was about to be time, past time really, to be taking the GRE, and getting out grad school applications. I was about to be looking for my first apartment, paying my own bills and signing my own leases for the first time in my life.
What was originally supposed to be a short break from collecting to focus on other things in life soon became a very protracted pause in my coin collecting as my life changed in ways I never would have thought or guessed. Buying these coins and laying the foundation for this set became the last surge and last hurrah of what I now think of as the first phase of my coin collecting life, which lasted about 3 years from 2007 to 2009.
By the time I added the next coin to this set, I was a father with not 1 but 3 degrees to my name. I never would have expected that.
Last Rev: 09/2019