Set Description
The short set concept has long been a staple for Mercury Dime and Walking Liberty Half Dollar collectors. For Mercury Dimes the short set can cover the dates from 1941, or 1934 for the expanded set, to 1945. The Walkers can run from 1941 or 1934 to 1947. Collecting this way offers the hobbyist an opportunity to complete a set of attractive coins, usually all in Mint State, without having to deal with the "impossible" key dates from the teens and twenties.
I happened upon the idea of collecting a set of Type III gold dollars from the 1880s. The coins were all available in Choice to Gem Mint State (MS-63 to 67), and were all quite attractive for reasons that I will cover shortly. I found the set to be challenging, despite the fact that many people view these coins as "common."
The gold dollar made its debut in general circulation in 1849. The legislation that created it also added the $20 gold piece or double eagle to the American roster of coins. That law coincided with an explosion in the amount of gold that was available from the California gold rush.
The gold dollar was popular coin in the 1850s and very early 1860s. People liked it because it had a reliable value compared to the privately issued state chartered bank notes which were only as sound as the institution that issued them. The gold dollar was made of precious metal and spoke for itself in terms of intrinsic value.
All of that changed with the outbreak of the Civil War. When it became evident that the war would continue for a long time, people hoarded virtually all of the gold and silver coinage and even pulled the copper-nickel cents from circulation. The resulting coin shortage prompted merchants to issue private scrip and Civil War tokens, while the Union Government issued Fractional Currency and National Bank notes.
At the end of the Civil War, the cents and silver coinage returned to circulation, but gold coins continued to trade at amounts in excess of their face value in terms of the Federal currency which were called "greenbacks." Gold coins would trade at more than their par value with paper money until the end of the Grant presidential administration in the mid 1870s.
Although most coins returned to active circulation after the war the Silver Three Cent Piece and the gold dollar never regained their pre-war popularity. The mint attempted to get more gold dollars into circulation in 1873-4 when it melted large numbers of the small and obsolete Type I gold dollars and converted the bullion into Type III gold dollars. Those efforts did little to regenerate interest in the gold dollar, and the annual mintages drifted lower.
By the late 1870s there were only two groups of customers for the gold dollar, coin collectors, coin hoarders and jewelers. These late date gold dollars had little if any impact on the overall economy. Coin collectors continued to save some coins for their collections and jewelers used them in their artistic creations.
In 1880 the gold dollar mintage hit a low of only 1,600 pieces. From there the mintages increased a little but were often within the range of 5 to 10 thousand. The low mintages resulted in many coins that had strong, sometimes Proof-Like (P-L) luster. The reason was that dies were seldom used to the extent where they lost luster from their initial die polishing. The design devices were also sharp.
In the days before certification, many collectors and dealers had a hard time differentiating between the P-L business strikes and the Proofs. The rule of thumb was if you were unsure as to whether or not a piece was a Proof, it was best to offer it as a Mint State piece.
By 1889 it had become obvious that the gold dollar would never regain its popularity. The continued production of the coin with the anticipation that it would have any impact in the economy was futile. Therefore on September 25, 1890, Congress passed legislation that ended the production of the gold dollar for general circulation.
Set Goals
I have yet to decide if I will expand this set to include some coins from the 1870s. I have completed the Type I and Type II gold dollar sets, but the Type III coins offer special challenges. That set covers three and a half decades, and the 1856-D, 1860-D, 1875-P and most especially 1861-D coins present strong financial challenges to their acquisition. I have toyed with the idea of a one a year set for the Type III dollars, and perhaps that is the direction I will go.