Legendary Rare Coins: In numismatics, some coins are more than just coins – they are historical artifacts of immense meaning. These oddballs — often the result of odd occurrences, errors at the mint or limited mintages — provide snapshots of American history at price points that remind collectors of their rarified place in the collecting world.
Legendary Rare Coins: The Ultra High Relief (1907) Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle
One of America’s most beautiful coin designs, the President Theodore Roosevelt and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens collaboration, came with restrictions that today make it easy to collect.
1907 Ultra high relief pattern coins raised in such high relief the bears had to be struck more than once to completely raise up the design.
Mass production was prevented by technical limitations, and the issue stands as perhaps the purest embodiment of Saint-Gaudens’ linguistic strength.
These coins portray Liberty on the obverse walking with a torch in her right hand and an olive branch in her left with a set of rays in the background.
The reverse shows an eagle in flight. The dimensionality of these pieces—and particularly their high relief, for which the dated pieces required special protection—made them unsuitable for circulation, but also elevated them to collector’s status as works of art.
Those types make only sporadic auction appearances, and they almost always bring prices of seven figures, wherein case, one in fact sold for $2.99 million back in 2005.
The Brasher Doubloon (1787)
Prior to the federal mint, a few private citizens were known to have made coins in order to facilitate trade. Ephraim Brasher, a New York goldsmith and neighbor of George Washington, designed gold coins that would circulate next to foreign pieces in the early United States.
His “doubloons,” which had an approximate value of $15 in gold, were stamped with the rising sun design and the special “EB” maker mark.
A total of just seven Brasher Doubloons have survived. The most widely known example of the sort, stamped by Brasher on the eagle’s breast rather than wing, fetched nearly $7.4 million in 2011, making it among the most valuable coins produced in America.
These coins are an essential part of kaleidoscope US monetary days – before US government money came to birth through regulation.
The 1913 Liberty Head Nickel
If any U.S. coin illustrates how circumstances of production can make a coin a legend, it is the 1913 Liberty Head nickel.
The Liberty Head was officially replaced by the Buffalo nickel in February 1913, but five Liberty nickels dated 1913 surfaced in the 1920s.
These illicit issues – presumably punched surreptitiously by a mint worker named Samuel Brown – have long been the ne plus ultra of coin collecting.
It’s a tale that includes no small amount of true blue collecting and Hollywood stardom as well, with the helmets showing up in an episode of Hawaii Five-O and captivating a legion of reporters.
The best-known example, which had previously belonged to King Farouk of Egypt, sold for $4.56 million in 2013. Although of uncertain legitimacy, theses five coins have enjoyed a semi-mythical status, epitomizing the appeal of rogue rarities in the American numismatic psyche.
The 1794 Flowing Hair Silver Dollar
The initial minted silver dollars from the United States Mint became physical links to the country’s initial monetary developments.
The first 1795s were produced on October 15, 1794 and bear the flowing-haired Liberty obverse and a reverse with an eagle within a wreath.
What today is probably the first silver dollar struck also has been noticed.This resulted in many weakly struck specimens being issued.
This examples of this coin, as a prooflike with possibly special preparation, realized $10 million in 2013 – the most ever paid for a single U.S. coin at the time.
Beyond their cash value, these 1794 dollars symbolize a nation’s resolve to develop a coinage entirely of its own, free from any European model.
Legendary Rare Coins: The 1933 Double Eagle
Any list of famous American coins would certainly be remiss not to include the 1933 Double Eagle — a coin that exemplifies where numismatics meets an enigmatic moment in US history.
445,500 were produced, but none were released because of President Franklin Roosevelt’s gold recall order. Nearly all were melted, but a few survived by some mysterious dispensation.
For decades, the government treated all of 1933 Double Eagles as stolen property and sought in aggressive fasion their return.
One of them was monetized in an astonishing twist of fate and subsequently auctioned off in 2002 for $7,590,000, in a deal with the owner and the U.S.
government. More coins found hiding in a family safety deposit box ended up the subject of a protracted legal fight, with a court ruling in 2021 that their owner should have known they belonged to the government.
These storied coins, each the focus of interest of lore filled with tales of artistic and historic triumph or even infamy, are a reminder that many numismatic treasures rise well above the price attached to their existence- becoming cultural artifacts that tell the American story.
They remind us that coins are more than just economic instruments; they’re also physical links to our past — little catalogs of artistic, technological and political evolution that collectors and historians find fascinating to this day.
