ARCHIVE: Expensive but undervalued $3 Gold

Editor’s Note: This content originally ran in the Spring 2018 issue. N.O.W. is dipping into the past to fill out future issues, but only when the situation calls for it due to a lack of content. Some images may not be able to be recreated, but text will be placed back verbatim as it was.

It’s a fair bet to say that, except for those of us with the deepest of pockets, collecting $3 gold pieces by date and mint mark is something of a fantasy, a wish list item, if you will. The coins just seem too expensive for anyone to look at seriously. Let’s look at the series in a bit of detail, though, and see if there might be some way for us to buy in, some way to at least own a few of these strange, uncommon gold pieces.

When it comes to gold coinage, the $3 denomination was not one of the originals that were authorized in the 1790s. No, it was 1853 when Congress got around to authorizing this small gold piece, and 1854 before the Mint could bring any of them to the public. The design, either that of a Native American or of Lady Liberty wearing a Native American headdress, was the artistry of Mr. James Longacre, one of many of his works that grace United States coins. And that first year saw 138,618 produced at the main Mint in Philly, 24,000 coined at the branch facility down in New Orleans, and just 1,120 made at the branch Mint in Dahlonega, Georgia.

These first three issues of $3 gold pieces give us something of a set of numbers for the highs and lows within this series. In 1853, the folks at the Mint in Philly probably didn’t know it, but this would be the biggest single mintage for the entire set, even though they would be produced up to 1889. The 1854 issue of Philadelphia is the only one ever to make it to six figures (the next closest is the 1878 with 82,304 as its official tally), making it the most common date in the series. Today, it will cost about $1,000 to land one in a grade such as EF.

$3 Gold, Actual size: 20.5 weight mm, 5.015 grams, composition .900 gold. .100 copper, reeded edge.

The southern Appalachian gold rushes had peaked long before Dahlonega produced its 1,120 $3 gold pieces – even the California Gold Rush of 1849 was a couple of years in the past. But this issue can still serve as something of a benchmark for a rare $3 gold piece, since aficionados of early gold are always attracted to the ‘D’ and the ‘C’ mint marks. The same EF grade will now cost about $20 K. By any stretch, that’s a lot of green for a single coin.

But here’s where we find our first interesting twist of numbers and prices: the 1854-D is more than 100 times less common than the 1854, yet it costs twenty times more. That doesn’t make it cheap, or some kind of sleeper, but it does give us a moment of pause, a moment to think. Are there other dates and mint marks within this series that might be worth looking at in terms of cost?

In the entire $3 gold piece series, from 1854 to 1889, there are only nine dates or mint marks that were struck to the tune of over ten thousand coins. As mentioned, 1854 is the line year of more than 100K coins, and the following nine make up a sort of second tier of common ones. The 1854-O, the 1855, the 1856, the 1856-S, the 1857, and the 1857-S (the smallest in the club, with only 14,000 pieces), the 1859, and the final two, the 1874 with 41,800 and the 1878 with the already-mentioned 82,304.

Putting not only these dates together, but also their prices, a person finds that the baseline figure is about $1,500 for each in the EF grade, with a couple being higher. The 1854-O and the 1857-S are the only real hiccups in this grouping, with each costing about $2,750 in that EF grade.

Now, admittedly, in looking for a pattern to prices, and in looking to determine if these gold pieces can be collected, we are making an assumption or two. The biggest is that all the pieces listed in the official tally have survived until today. They probably have not. But still, we have seen that the single most common coin in this series costs about 2/3rds of those in the second tier.

And, importantly, the second tier is expensive, but not insanely so. A person could save up for one of these.

The obvious next place to look among the $3 gold pieces is at the dates and mint marks that ring in between one thousand and ten thousand coins. There are plenty of them in this zone, and no matter what sort of prices we may uncover, it will probably be hard to find them, even at the biggest shows. They are, after all, scarce at best, rare at worst.

With that in mind, a look through the major price guides indicates that several of these rarer $3 gold pieces cost about $1,500 - $1,750 in the EF grade we’ve been using for our comparisons. The last two years, 1888 and 1889, which have totals of 5,000 and 2,300 coins respectively, certainly fall into this price range. So do all the years from 1867 to 1870. It seems then we may indeed have uncovered some sleepers here, coins that are quite rare based on their official counts, but seriously undervalued.

We started by commenting that the $3 gold pieces were perceived by many to be too expensive to collect, and if you have always held fast to something like a $100 upper limit to your numismatic purchases, these coins are always going to be out of reach. But we’ve just noted how widely different the mintages in this series are, and yet how close the price tags can be, at least for coins that have circulated a bit. We may not be tempted to stop collecting other series in favor of these gold pieces. But it does appear that adding one or two to any collection might not be as hard as we generally think—food for thought.

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