CoinsEarly DollarsHistory
The complete history
Three arcs run through this series, and they do not end together: the coinage arc (1792–1806), the discovery arc by which the hobby worked out what the 1804 dollar actually was (1834–1905), and the market arc, which is still running. The last coin struck for circulation from a die of this series left the press in 1804 or 1805. Everything after that is aftermath — and the aftermath is the better story.
Arc one · 1792–1806
The coinage arc
Entries in bold type are anchored to a document held in the OunceDesk Archive. The rest rest on a source outside it and say so.
April 2, 1792
The Mint Act §9 fixes the dollar: “each to be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, and to contain three hundred and seventy-one grains and four sixteenth parts of a grain of pure, or four hundred and sixteen grains of standard silver.”
July 31, 1792
Director David Rittenhouse lays the cornerstone of the Mint — the first building erected by the federal government for public use.
October 1792
Half dismes struck. Washington's annual message of November 6 calls it “a small beginning in the coinage of half-dimes.”
November 23, 1793
Robert Scot is appointed the Mint's first Engraver, and will design both dollars in this series. Joseph Wright, appointed draughtsman and die-sinker, had died in the 1793 yellow-fever epidemic before the dollar existed.
March 3, 1794
“An act in alteration of the act establishing a Mint” provides for execution of bond by the chief coiner and assayer. The bonding problem is why silver coinage did not begin in 1793.
July 18, 1794
First deposit of silver bullion: the Bank of Maryland, “coins of France,” $80,715.73½.
October 15, 1794
The first return of silver coins to the Treasurer — the delivery that produced the 1794 dollars. 1,758 pieces on the reconstructed figure, and the whole series starts here.
1794–95
The Flowing Hair type. Some 1794–95 dollars carry a silver plug driven into an underweight planchet to bring it to standard; PCGS recognises it as a distinct issue.
late 1795
The Draped Bust obverse is introduced — Haseltine's “fillet head,” his type-table Nos. 14–15, still paired with the small-eagle reverse.
1798
The Heraldic Eagle reverse replaces the small eagle mid-year. Die production is at its most chaotic: Haseltine counted “30 different obverses of the dollar, with 17 reverses” for 1798.
1799
423,515 dollars delivered — the series' peak year.
January 1, 1803
Director Elias Boudinot reports on CY1802: total coinage $516,115.83, of which 41,650 dollars. He warns the President that the Mint's authorising law expires “on the 4th of March next, by its own limitation.”
January 6, 1804
Boudinot on CY1803: “Notwithstanding the dull prospect at the beginning of the year, coinage, of every kind, amounts… to the sum of three hundred and seventy thousand six hundred and ninety-eight dollars and fifty-three cents.” 66,064 dollars delivered.
1804
19,570 dollars delivered — the last substantial delivery of the series, and, on the evidence, struck from dies dated 1803 or earlier.
January 25, 1805
Jefferson transmits the CY1804 report. Boudinot attributes the year's heavy silver coinage to “the late scarcity of Spanish dollars, occasioned by the great exportation of them, for mercantile purposes,” and notes about $11,000 of the gold came from Cabarrus County, North Carolina.
March 5, 1805
A Northampton newspaper prints the Director's CY1804 abstract in full: 19,570 dollars, 156,519 half dollars, 6,738 quarter dollars, 8,265 dismes. This is the earliest printing of the 19,570 figure the Archive holds — and the seed of two centuries of confusion.
1805
321 dollars delivered — the last. No dollar dated 1805 has ever been reported.
1806
Coinage of silver dollars suspended. Hepburn: “President Jefferson undertook to check this business in 1806 by directing that the mint suspend the coinage of the dollar pieces. This suspension continued until after the legislation of 1834.”
1842
Eckfeldt & DuBois, assayers of the Mint, state the consequence flatly: “No dollars from 1806 to 1838, except 1000 in 1836.”
Where 97% of them went
The recoinage carousel
Roughly 1.44 million dollars were delivered between 1794 and 1805. The published survival estimates for the whole series total in the low tens of thousands. Something consumed 97–98% of them, and the documents say exactly what.
The Mint Act pegged the dollar to “the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current,” but the American coin came out slightly lighter than a full-weight Spanish piece — and American dollars were accepted by tale, counted rather than weighed, throughout the Caribbean. Hepburn states the mechanism plainly:
“Although somewhat less in weight than the Spanish pieces, the American dollars were accepted by tale throughout the West Indies and were exported for that reason. Spanish and Mexican pieces were imported, and those of full weight, or nearly so, were recoined into dollars at the mint, the depositors reaping the profit.”
Deposit heavy Spanish dollars, receive lighter American ones, ship the American ones south, buy more Spanish dollars, repeat. Every turn of the carousel put freshly struck US dollars on a boat and never brought one back — and the Mint was running it at the exact moment its dollar output was largest, 1798–1800.
Boudinot describes the domestic half of the same machinery, 1802
“All these deposites were private property, the certificates for which were sold, generally, as soon as given, to the banks in this city, at a fourth and a half per cent. discount for the delay of coinage. The banks are fond of keeping the coin in their vaults, as part of their capitals, on account of the ease with which they are counted, without the trouble of weighing.”
“Without the trouble of weighing” is the whole problem in five words. A coinage accepted by count rather than by weight is a coinage that will be arbitraged.
The ratio underneath it
The Act of 1792 made 24.75 grains of pure gold and 371.25 grains of pure silver each a dollar — a ratio of 1 to 15. Silver immediately began to decline, and “before 1800 it had reached the ratio of 15.42.” The dollars of this series were struck into a widening mispricing, and the Monetary Commission of 1876 described the result for the fractional silver as a completed fact: “Vainly did the United States Mint issue American fractional coins of full weight and value, as these were soon melted up, and the bullion sold at a high profit.”
What the numbers imply
This series has no hoard.
There is no keg, no bag, no vault find, no Randall-style discovery that reset the market for an early dollar date. When a 1794 dollar appears, it appears one at a time. That absence is not a gap in the research — it is the story, and it is why the survival estimates are as low as they are.
| Date | Delivered | Survival est. (PCGS, all grades) | Implied survival |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1794 | 1,758 | 150 | ~8.5% |
| 1797 (all varieties) | 7,776 | ~3,000+ | ~40%ANOMALOUS |
| 1798 (all varieties) | 327,536 | ~7,175 | ~2.2% |
| 1799 (all varieties) | 423,515 | ~9,380 | ~2.2% |
| 1800 (all varieties) | 220,920 | ~5,725 | ~2.6% |
| 1801 | 54,454 | 2,000 | ~3.7% |
| 1803 (both varieties) | 66,064 | ~3,000 | ~4.5% |
DERIVED These rates are computed by OunceDesk from two sources with different assumptions — the Mint's delivery figures (S3) and PCGS's survival estimates (S31). They are an analytical result, not a figure from any published authority (D1).
The 1798–1800 rates cluster tightly at 2–3%, which is what a slow, uniform export-and-melt predicts. 1797 does not fit, and the most economical explanation is not that 1797 dollars were unusually treasured but that 7,776 does not correspond to the number of coins dated 1797 — the delivery-versus-date problem again, surfacing as an arithmetic anomaly two centuries later. The 1794 rate is high for the opposite and obvious reason: the first dollars were saved as curiosities from the start, and William Strickland's purchase in 1794–95 is proof the impulse was immediate.
Say it explicitly
Three melts that are not this series'
The early dollars were not withdrawn or melted by the government. No recall, no redemption, no official melt. They were consumed by commerce, one profitable shipment at a time, over about thirty years — which is why attrition is high but uniform, and why there is no surviving bag. Three events get attached to them anyway.
The Pittman Act melt of 1918
Over 270 million silver dollars were melted under the Act of April 23, 1918. Those were Morgan dollars in Treasury vaults. No evidence connects early dollars to it, and by 1918 no meaningful quantity of 1794–1804 dollars was in government hands.
The 1834 recoinage legislation
The Act of June 28, 1834 changed the standard weight of GOLD. Silver dollars were not affected and there was no early-dollar melt.
The 1804 "China shipwreck"
A story, not an event. Its persistence is precisely because the series lacks a real hoard-or-loss event, and the vacuum invited one.
The one genuine concentration: the Mint Cabinet
If this series has anything resembling a hoard it is the U.S. Mint Cabinet, formed from 1838 and later the National Numismatic Collection. It is the only place where early dollars were deliberately set aside rather than spent — and, as the 1804 story shows, it was also the place from which coins left the building in exchange for other coins. Stickney's 1843 trade and the Parmelee coin's acquisition “from the Mint at face value” by an unnamed woman during Polk's administration are both cabinet outflows, and they are the reason three of the eight Class I 1804 dollars have a private pedigree at all.
The 1842 Manual records the cabinet's other role — as a source of models. Copies of the coins to be illustrated were taken by electrotype, and “the finest specimens of coin, belonging to the cabinet of the Mint, were at our command for this purpose.” Every 1804 dollar in print for the next forty years descends from a machine tracing of a Mint Cabinet coin.
Arc two · 1834–1905
The discovery arc, in brief
How the hobby found out what the 1804 dollar actually was. The full version — the censuses, the dissent, the recantation, the ghost census of coins that weren't — is the series' crown chapter.
1834
The State Department orders diplomatic presentation sets for Edmund Roberts' mission to Siam and Muscat. The Mint, having no dollar of current date, strikes dollars dated 1804 — the last year its own records showed a dollar coinage.
1842
Eckfeldt & DuBois publish the Manual. Plate II no. 3 is captioned “Dollar, 1797–1805”, and later authorities all identify the coin ruled for it as an 1804. The first appearance of the 1804 dollar in print.
May 9, 1843
Matthew A. Stickney receives an 1804 dollar at the Mint from W. E. DuBois in exchange for the 1785 Immune Columbia in gold. “It was not then considered any more valuable than any other of the series.”
1858
Mint employees strike plain-edge pieces from the 1804 dies without a collar. The official account says all were recovered and destroyed but one. Seven Class III coins say otherwise.
1867
Woodward sells the Mickley collection and detects the first documented altered-date 1804 in the same year. The sale catalogue already admits the restrike problem in print.
1887–1905
John A. Nexsen runs a private census out of his house in Brooklyn, publishes four of them, finds the physical evidence that breaks his own position in 1897, and recants in print in 1905.
1962
Newman & Bressett publish The Fantastic 1804 Dollar and establish the Class I / II / III taxonomy — sixty-five years after Nexsen reached the essential conclusion by a different route.
Arc three · 1867–2026, still running
The market arc
| Date | Coin | Realized |
|---|---|---|
| October 1867 | The Mickley 1804 (Class I), Mickley sale lot 1696 | $750 |
| June 26, 1907 | The Stickney 1804 (Class I), Chapman lot 849 — “the greatest price ever paid for a coin of the United States series” | $3,600 |
| January 2013 | 1794 Flowing Hair, silver plug, PCGS SP66 — the first coin of any nation to sell for eight figures | $10,016,875 |
| August 2021 | The Watters–Childs 1804 Class I, PCGS PR68 | $7,680,000 |
| November 18, 2025 | 1794 dollar, PCGS MS63+ | $4,500,000 |
| December 9, 2025 | The James A. Stack 1804 Class III, PCGS PR65 — previously unrecorded, in one collection since before 1951 | $6,000,000 |
| January 14, 2026 | The Presidio 1804 Class III, PCGS PR58 | $3,538,000 |
Nineteenth-century prices are from the priced catalogues and periodical reports held in the OunceDesk Archive; modern prices are as published by PCGS CoinFacts, observed 2026-08-23. OunceDesk is not the seller and hosts no bidding.
The discovery arc is not closed. In December 2025 the census of a coin that has been counted, argued over and litigated since 1867 gained a member — and every published count before 2026 became old rather than wrong.
Sources
OBSERVED
39 sources
ESTIMATED
2 sources
DERIVED
2 sources
Sourced figures on this page trace to the ledger below. Editorial judgement is labelled as ours, and prices we have not sourced are not published.
View all sources & evidence methodology →Continue: the first mintthe 1804 dollarkey dates & survivalcollecting pathways
Delivery figures per the Mint's own registry (S1, S3, S4, S5); the export mechanism per Hepburn (S29) and the Monetary Commission (S36); the 1806 suspension per Hepburn (S29) and Eckfeldt & DuBois (S7); survival estimates are PCGS's (S31), observed 2026-08-23. Implied survival rates are OunceDesk arithmetic over two sources with different assumptions (D1) and are not a figure from any published authority.