Owner Comments:
This 1/4-ounce $10 gold eagle, along with a similar 1/10-ounce $5 counterpart, is the first business-strike U.S. bullion coin that bears the W mintmark. In 1999, all U.S. gold bullion coins were struck at the mint in West Point, New York, but only the Proof version of the coin, sold directly to collectors, includes a mintmark. The bullion version, sold through official distributors, was made for the purpose of offering a high-quality, U.S. government–made product to investors in precious metals. These bullion versions trade largely based on their intrinsic metal content. Bullion coins do not include a mintmark, while collectible versions of these coins do. The dies that produce these coins are made in Philadelphia and then shipped to West Point to strike coins. It is thought that a die intended for the production of Proof coins did not receive the final finishing steps and was sent to West Point. Being virtually indistinguishable from a bullion-coin die, it was put into use and 1/4-ounce gold eagles bearing the W mintmark were produced. This variety is alternately called the 1999-W “With W” and the 1999-W Struck from Unpolished Proof Dies. It is said that Proof dies are individually accounted for and a number of manual quality-control steps occur in the production of these coins. How, then, could such an error occur? The blame likely rests on the enormous number of gold bullion coins struck in 1999. Y2K fears contributed to a flight to tangible assets, and the gold eagle was one of the chief beneficiaries. In most years, only 70,000 to 80,000 1/4-ounce $10 gold eagle bullion coins are struck. In 1999, however, a total of 564,232 were struck—a number that mintage figures have not approached since. Mintage levels have not even come within 400,000 coins of this figure since then. The die-production facilities and the quality-control processes were so overworked that it’s easy to understand how such an error may have been created. Approximately 6,000 1/4-ounce gold eagles are struck from each die-pair. Because it’s widely thought that just one die with the W mintmark was used to create this coin, that figure is also the estimated mintage. Roughly 3,000 examples have been accounted for among the boxes of 1/4-ounce gold eagles. It is not unusual for these coins to trade hands still within the strapped boxes they were shipped in from the West Point Mint, and many pieces still remain to be discovered. Interest in this coin grew in 2006, when the U.S. Mint offered Uncirculated versions of the American Eagle Bullion program coins directly to collectors. These coins made for direct sale to the public did include the W mintmark, and were issued in 2006, 2007, and 2008. To construct a complete set, collectors for the first time needed to acquire two different eagles: a coin with and a coin without the mintmark. The focus on mintmarks encouraged many collectors to take a second look at this coin, the first gold eagle $10 coin with a mintmark, but with only a few thousand in collectors’ hands, it is a hot commodity.
Garrett, Jeff; Schechter, Scott; Bressett, Kenneth; Bowers, Q. David (2011-03-04). 100 Greatest US Modern Coins (Kindle Locations 1495-1519). Whitman Publishing. Kindle Edition.