Coins Early Half DollarsReferences

Sources & evidence

Every important figure in this reference traces to one of the sources below. 69 of the 79 are physically held in the OunceDesk Archive; 10 are not, and the ledger says which is which, because a sentence resting on a book we have read is a different kind of sentence from one resting on a book we have not.

What the badges mean

Held, and quotable, are separate questions

CONTEMPORANEOUS MINT REPORTS

The delivery record for this series lives in thirty-six separate annual reports, one per calendar year from 1801 to 1836, every one of them in the Archive. They are cited by year — MR1816 — rather than crammed into one source number.

PUBLIC DOMAIN · quotable at length

United States federal publications and works published before 1930. Where you see an extended quotation on this site, it comes from one of these.

LIMITED · facts with attribution only

In copyright, or under terms that permit citation but not reproduction. Facts are used with attribution; nothing is quoted at length and no images are reproduced.

The distinction bites hardest on the modern specialist literature, which this reference depends on and does not hold: Overton's Early Half Dollar Die Varieties and its Parsley editions, which are the O-numbers themselves; Souders' Bust Half Fever; Karoleff's Bibliomania; Davignon on contemporary counterfeits; Witham's biography of Reich; and the Leaman–Gunnet edge-die study. Those works are cited as the origin of what they established and never quoted, and no O-number rarity rating from any of them is reproduced here. One of them, Beistle's 1929 Register, is public domain by publication date and simply has not been acquired — an acquisition target rather than a rights problem.

Not every Archive identifier resolves to a public link. The Archive's source ids encode Internet Archive identifiers, but they are not a URL generator: 34 of them were verified to resolve and carry a link below, and 33 do not and show their identifier with no link. Publishing a constructed URL that quietly 404s is worse than publishing none.

The imagery record

Sixteen of this series' thirty-nine issues are pictured. Every coin photograph is public domain, and the twenty-three gaps are stated rather than filled.

American Numismatic Society

Public Domain Mark and a No Copyright – United States rights statement, published per object in machine-readable form. Their records also carry the OVERTON NUMBER — this series' own die-marriage attribution, from the institution rather than from our reading of the coin — and they catalogue counterfeits as counterfeits, which no commercial source will ever do.

Bibliothèque nationale de France

The département des Monnaies, médailles et antiques has photographed its United States half dollars at roughly 3,600 pixels and released them into the public domain. This was not a source the OunceDesk playbook knew about before this series; it covers 1795, 1806, 1807, 1822, 1826, 1831, 1835 and 1836.

National Numismatic Collection

The Smithsonian's 1822 proof. It was already sitting in the OunceDesk visual-library manifest as an unpromoted candidate from an earlier sweep — checked before any network was touched, exactly as the playbook says to.

The twenty-three that carry no coin

No rights-clean photograph of these issues was found in any public collection. The shape of the gap is itself the story: the museums photographed the rare early dates and the proof strikings, and nobody photographed the workhorses. That includes the two most consequential Capped Bust dates in the series — the 1815, whose 47,150 pieces were delivered in 1816, and the 1817, which contains the 1817/4. An honest empty frame beats a rights-murky picture, so those pages carry no coin.

1807 Capped Bust · 1808 · 1809 · 1810 · 1811 · 1812 · 1813 · 1814 · 1815 · 1817 · 1818 · 1819 · 1820 · 1821 · 1823 · 1824 · 1825 · 1827 · 1828 · 1829 · 1832 · 1833 · 1834

What was rejected, and why

Several photographs of these dates ARE on Wikimedia Commons tagged “public domain”, and they were rejected on inspection. The tag rests on the reasoning that the coin's DESIGN is public domain — which is true, and which says nothing about the photograph. The rejected files are credited in their own metadata to PCGS CoinFacts, to a coin dealer's studio, and to a 1975 auction catalogue's photographer. A public-domain coin does not make a copyrighted photograph of it public domain.

No Bust Half Nut Club image is reproduced anywhere on this site. The club's pictures are third-party photographs credited to Stack's, PCGS CoinFacts, Sheridan Downey, Mark Goodman and Heritage, and republishing them would be a discourtesy to a small organisation this reference otherwise relies on. No PCGS photograph is hotlinked for this series either — its own IMAGE-LEADS guidance says not to, and unlike the early dollars there was no need.

How the commercial links were checked

Every PCGS link on this site was title-gated, and the sweep found things worth publishing.

PCGS CoinFacts ignores the descriptive slug in a coin URL and keys only on the trailing number — and a fabricated number returns HTTP 200 with a generic landing page rather than an error. A link therefore cannot be validated by status code; it has to be validated by reading the page's own title. Every PCGS link in this reference was resolved and title-checked on 2026-08-24, and 105 coin pages for this series were catalogued in the process.

PCGS publishes NO plain-date page for eleven of this series' thirty-nine issues — 1796, 1803, 1806, the 1807 Capped Bust, 1811, 1820, 1827, 1828, 1830, 1832 and 1834. There are only variety pages. That is the series' central fact showing up in a catalogue's table of contents: for those dates, the date is not the unit.
PCGS carries SEVEN 1806 major varieties, not six: alongside the Knob 6 No Stem, Pointed 6 Stem, Pointed 6 No Stem, Knob 6 Small Stars, 1806/5 Large Stars and 6 over Inverted 6, there is a Knob 6 LARGE Stars. Recorded as a correction.
In PCGS's own numbering the 1815/2 is followed immediately by the 1817. There is no 1816 half dollar in the sequence — independent corroboration, from a commercial catalogue, of the gap the Mint's own reports describe.
Two varieties this reference discusses have no PCGS page in the swept range: the 1807 “Bearded Goddess” O-111a and the 1795 A over E in STATES. Both are named in PCGS's variety tables. They are left unlinked rather than guessed at.

MR1801OBSERVEDReport of the Director of the Mint for calendar 1801