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1908-S Indian Cent

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1908-S%20Indian%20Cent%20O_zpsbmubr4eh.jpg1908-S%20Indian%20Cent%20R_zpskqvqybyq.jpg

 

Here is another Summer FUN purchase, a 1908-S Indian Cent.

 

Why add this you might ask? The reason is that it was the first U.S. cent to be issued from a branch mint, and it was the first branch mint coin that was not made of gold or silver. For that reason it is "a bit of history."

 

All of this begs the question. Why didn't the U.S. government issue cents earlier? The large cents are understandable. They were never popular and did not circulate well. The small cents were a different story. The government issued millions of them, and after the Civil War they stayed in circulation.

 

One could understand why California didn't need cents during the gold rush years. Prices were so high that a cent could not have purchased much of anything. Yet, after the area got more "civilized," why didn't the demand for small change force their production at San Francisco earlier? Perhaps someone here has an answer.

 

This piece is graded MS-65, R&B. The reverse is mostly brown, which tells me that this one spent quite a bit of time in a coin cabinet with perhaps the obverse up.

 

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The San Francisco Mint began receiving cents from the Philadelphia Mint in the 1880s, and both this denomination and the nickel grew in popularity there as mass production lowered prices. The authorizing legislation for the San Francisco and Denver Mints had specified that they were for the coining of gold and silver only. A supplementary law was finally passed in 1906 authorizing all of the mints to produce minor coins, though it took a few years more for them to actually do this. Another reason for doing this was so that San Francisco could take over the minting of all coins for The Philippines, which it did in 1908.

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By the late 1850s, SF mint officers wanted to coin cents. They asked again in the late 1860s as the economy became increasingly connected to the east coast. The Philippine coinage/recoinage was a major factor in changes necessary for SF minting of minor coins.

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Very Nice IHC, I have one but in a much lower grade and slabbed but I like it.

Nice info on the SF mint & the Philippines coinage there.

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During the teens and 1920s the Mint Bureau made a lot of money designing and producing coins for other countries - mostly in Central and South America. WW-II brought a surge in contract production.

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