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All About Mintmarks
 | By Alan Herbert, Coins Magazine
March 17, 2008 |
Mintmarks are interesting, confusing and sometimes rather strange. So they generate more than their fair share of problems for the average collector.
For example, why is the mintmark on the silver American Eagles on the reverse? Most assume there is a law affecting mintmarks, but a little research discovers that there is no law changing the mintmarks all to the obverse of our circulating coins, merely an internal decision at the Mint to standardize position.
While the official comment at the time the silver Eagles were first struck was that the S "looked better" on the reverse, it apparently was a throwback to the traditional position for the S mintmark for the coins, which had copied the old Walking Liberty halves, from which the silver Eagle obverse was copied.
Then you get the confusion between a mintmark and a designer's initial or initials. The question here is: "I have a 1918-SM quarter." The "S" is the San Francisco mintmark. The "M" that appears on the Standing Liberty quarters is the designer's initial, for Hermon A. MacNeil. Hermon is always good for a question or two, but that is the correct spelling.
Another source of confusion are the mintmarks on proof coins. One reader noticed that the "S" mintmark on his proof dimes is different than the "S" on the other proof coins. If you examine several sets of proof coins (struck since 1985) you will probably notice that there are slight differences in the mintmark letter for each denomination, with the dime mintmarks the most apparent. This is because the mintmark is being copied from the plaster model to ultimately appear on the hub, which is used to make the dies. Since the dime die is the smallest, the opportunity for variations is greater, but since this different "S" appears on all proof dimes it has no special value.
For those of us with less-than-perfect vision, there is one persistent question: Why don't they go back to large mintmarks like the ones on the war nickels, so a collector doesn't have to have a microscope to see where a coin came from? While it's a good thought, it is not likely to get much support from the Mint.
Although they have been inconsistent over the years, varying mintmark sizes appear seemingly on a whim. The monsters used on the 1942-1945 nickels were among the largest mintmarks in the history of world coinage.
Our fascination with mintmarks didn't really come into its own until the Civil War era. Living in an era where information on every aspect of coin collecting is at our fingertips it is hard to picture the primitive conditions under which early day collectors labored. Mintage figures were unavailable and the Philadelphia Mint dominated the interest of collectors, the other mints while of local interest rarely influenced collecting in any way.
The collector of the day wanted a coin of the year, regardless of where it was minted, perhaps because little or no mintage information was available. As a result, collectors went strictly by date on coins in hand, guessing as to relative rarity. The turning point came with the publication by Augustus C. Heaton of A Treatise on the Coinage of the United States Branch Mints in 1893. Heaton listed 17 reasons for collecting mintmarked coins, and the race was on.
Even then the mintmark concept didn't catch on and coin dealer B. Max Mehl is quoted as saying that in 1903-1904 when he began dealing in coins he looked only at the date side of a coin before making an offer for it. Unthinkable today, but not back then. Curiously, the same attitude applied as recently as 1972 in Germany, when collectors first showed interest in mintmarks because of the Olympic coins of that year from the four German mints.
The mintmarks used by the U.S. Mint include C-Charlotte, CC-Carson City, D-Dahlonega and Denver, M-Manilla, O-New Orleans, P-Philadelphia, S-San Francisco, and W-West Point.
Most collectors would leave out Manilla, but it was officially a branch mint during the era of U.S. control over the Philippines.
Mintmarks were removed in 1965-1967 on the grounds that collectors were causing the coin shortage of that era, a false claim, never supported by the facts. There was a move by the government to repeat the 1965-1967 ban on mintmarks in the 1970s when a joint study was released in October 1974 by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, which determined to their satisfaction that the only purpose (which they labeled as "questionable") was to identify the source of production mistakes among coins already shipped out.
Alan Herbert, "The Answerman," may be reached by e-mail at: answerman2@aol.com. Questions may also be directed to him via "Coin Clinic," which appears in each issue of Coins. See the mailing instructions at the end of that column for specifics.
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