Barber Dime

History

The Mint Act of September 26, 1890 permitted the dime, quarter and half dollar to be redesigned after 1891, allowing changes once a design had served 25 years without a fresh act of Congress. Treasury first planned to invite the ten most prominent artists in America to a design competition, but they demanded payment for every entry whether selected or not, so the contest was opened to the public; about 300 submissions arrived, and judges Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Henry Mitchell and Mint Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber found only two worth even an honorable mention. Mint Director Edward O. Leech called the contest too wretched a failure and directed Barber to prepare the designs himself, telling a Boston Transcript reporter he saw no prospect of getting designs elsewhere in the country and that going to France was politically impossible. Barber's first submission, modeled on British coinage, showed Columbia standing with liberty pole and sword before an eagle; Leech rejected it and asked instead for a Liberty head in the manner of French Third Republic bronze and silver, producing the bust that reached circulation. The designs were released November 10, 1891 to a lukewarm reception, patterns only were struck that year, and the dime ran from 1892 to 1916 before the Mercury dime replaced it, roughly the minimum term the 1890 Act allowed.

Details

Charles Edward Barber, born in London in 1840 and the Mint's sixth chief engraver following the 1879 death of his father William Barber, designed the type. Each piece contains 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper, weighs 2.50 grams, measures 17.9 mm across with a reeded edge, and holds 0.07234 troy ounce of silver. No alloy change or design modification occurred within the run. Four mints struck the series: Philadelphia without a mint mark, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Denver beginning with the 1906-D. Business strikes total 504,317,075 pieces and proofs 17,353, with the 1894-S at 24 coins the smallest issue of any kind and the 1895-O at 440,000 the smallest circulation mintage.

Features

Liberty faces right in a Phrygian cap and laurel wreath, LIBERTY in small letters on the band above her forehead, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA around and the date below. The reverse places ONE DIME within a wreath, and the D, O and S mint marks sit on the reverse beneath that wreath. Because the same Liberty head serves the quarter and half dollar of the period, the dime is a frequent stop for type collectors assembling the trio. PCGS singles out the 1893/2 overdate, 1895-O, 1901-S, 1905 Micro O and 1913-S as the notable issues, while other listings add the 1903-S to the rarest group and count 1894-O, 1896-O, 1896-S, 1897-O, 1904-S and 1913-S among the semi-keys. The 1893 overdate, one of the earliest widely recognized die varieties in the series, shows a faint underlying 2 beneath the 3, and PCGS assigns both it and the 1905-O Micro O their own catalog numbers.

Notable facts

• Only nine 1894-S dimes are generally accounted for today, all of them proofs including two heavily worn impaired examples, though NGC places the surviving count at fewer than a dozen.
• A PCGS Secure Proof 66 1894-S with a CAC sticker brought $1,997,500 on January 16, 2016, and auction appearances of the date since 2005 have ranged from $1.3 million to $2.16 million.
• One of the impaired 1894-S proofs turned up in a junk coin box at Gimbels Department Store in 1957 and was bought for $2.40.
• NGC warns that the 1894-S has drawn both outright fakes and 1894 Philadelphia dimes with an added S, and it has published counterfeit-detection studies on the far more ordinary 1898 and 1903 issues as well.
• CAC, NGC and PCGS have together certified more than 63,000 business-strike Barber dimes, with Philadelphia coins appearing far more often than New Orleans or San Francisco pieces.
• Proofs were struck each year from 1892 through 1915, so no proof dime carries the final 1916 date.
• The 1896-S, from a mintage of 575,056, is estimated at roughly 1,500 survivors, fewer than 400 of them encapsulated by PCGS.
• Most dates are readily available in low circulated grades but become difficult in AU50 and finer, with the New Orleans and San Francisco issues commanding the largest premiums at that level.