CoinsEarly QuartersReferences
Sources & evidence
Every important figure in this reference traces to one of the sources below. 53 of the 59 are physically held in the OunceDesk Archive; 6 are not, and the ledger says which is which — 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
30
CONTEMPORANEOUS MINT REPORTS
The delivery record lives in thirty separate annual reports, cited by year — MR1824 — rather than crammed into one source number. The eighteen blank years are evidenced by the ABSENCE of a quarter-dollar line in the year's own report, which is itself cited.
55
PUBLIC DOMAIN · quotable at length
US federal publications and pre-1931 works — including, uniquely on this site, the series' own standard variety reference, Browning 1925, with its eight photographic plates.
4
LIMITED · facts with attribution only
In copyright or under restrictive terms: PCGS CoinFacts and the modern variety references. Facts are used with attribution; nothing is quoted at length and no images are reproduced.
The unusual thing about this evidence base is how little it depends on what it does not hold. The attribution system (Browning), its ancestor (Haseltine 1881), the earliest correct mintage printing (Dickeson 1859), the Mint's own institutional memory (Snowden 1860) and the whole delivery record are all held, public domain, and quotable. What is NOT held: the modern revisions (Tompkins 2008; Rea, Peterson, Karoleff & Kovach 2010), whose numeric variety rarities are therefore never reproduced here — and one book deliberately left behind a repository's access control (S33), with the rights disagreement recorded instead of resolved by download.
Not every Archive identifier resolves to a public link. The Archive's source ids encode Internet Archive identifiers, but an identifier is not a URL: each candidate link was tested on 2026-08-30, 27 resolved and carry links below, and 25did not and show their identifier with no link. Publishing a constructed URL that quietly 404s is worse than publishing none.
And no PCGS coin page is linked anywhere in this series. PCGS ignores the descriptive slug in a coin URL and keys on the trailing number — and a fabricated number returns HTTP 200 with a generic page, not an error. This site's rule (learned on the half dollars) is that a commercial catalogue link must be resolved and checked against its own page title before it ships. That title-gated sweep has not been run for the quarters, so PCGS is cited as a source and linked only at its catalogue root.
The imagery record
This series illustrates its own varieties, in the public domain — the first on the roster that can
8
BROWNING'S EIGHT PLATES (1925)
Ninety die varieties photographed for the standard reference, public domain by publication date, held in the OunceDesk Archive and reproduced here in full — plus per-coin figures cropped from them. Modern researchers still plate-match against these photographs; PCGS's census for the 1827/3 Original names a "Browning Plate Coin".
3
DOCUMENT IMAGES
Browning's title page and his two-page comparative coinage table — the 1925 printing of the unmerged delivery figures, a document worth publishing in its own right.
1
MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY
One, and it took correcting our own method to find it. The research pack reported zero coverage on Wikimedia Commons after sweeping the NNC-US-<year>-<denomination> filename convention. The museum-sourcing playbook names TWO conventions and says to check both; the descriptive one had not been run. It returns a Smithsonian National Numismatic Collection photograph of the 1822 25/50 C. at 5,820 × 2,947 — the series' only genuine coin portrait, and it happens to be one of its rarest coins. The ANS query recipe that works for dollars still returns nothing for subsidiary silver: that playbook gap is real and is recorded in the references.
The issues with no per-issue figure
Six issues carry no per-issue figure, because Browning's plates do not label the diagnostic that separates them and this reference will not guess: the 1806/5 and 1818/5 overdates (his plate numbering does not say which figure is the overdate), the 1819 and 1820 digit sizes, the 1831 letter sizes, and the 1827/3 Restrike (the plate's 1827 is matched to the Original's census). Their pages say so.
1806/5 · 1818/5 · 1819 Small 9 · 1819 Large 9 · 1820 Small 0 · 1820 Large 0 · 1831 Large Letters · 1827/3 Restrike
What was rejected, and what these images are
Images on public repositories tagged “public domain” whose metadata credits a grading service, dealer studio or auction house were rejected — the tag rests on the coin's design being public domain, not the photograph. Six Commons files titled “1796/1807/1819 quarter dollar obv|rev” are exactly this: tagged {{PD-USGov-money}}, which covers the federal DESIGN, while their own file pages give Source = coinfacts.com and Author = unknown. They are not used. The 1822 photograph passes because its file page carries {{PD-USGov-SI}} — a Smithsonian Institution work, which covers the photograph — with a named institutional source and a permission ticket. Numista's picture_copyright discipline (read the per-image field first) stands; Numista was not queried for this series at all.
These are 1925 halftones: excellent for attribution, which is what they were made for, and honest about what they are. No plate figure is presented as a coin portrait, none is retouched, and no PCGS photograph is hotlinked for this series — with Browning's plates on disk, commercial imagery is not needed for variety illustration. That is a first.
Two museum routes were run and both came back empty, which is itself recorded: the Smithsonian NNC sweep on Wikimedia Commons found one quarter-dollar file in the whole 1790s–1830s range, and it is a 1792 pattern rather than a series coin (S35); and the ANS collection query recipe that returns 75 records for early dollars returns zero for "Quarter Dollar" — and zero for "Half Dollar" too, a gap in the museum-image playbook's facet vocabulary now on record for the next series (S34).
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.12. The comparative statement lists eagles, half eagles, quarter eagles, dollars, half dollars, dismes, half dismes and cents — and no quarter dollars in any of the five years.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-report-presidential-message-1802--ia-messagefrompresi1803unit-m4h1
United States Mint
pp.1, 12. The CY1802 and CY1803 abstracts — no quarter dollars.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1803--ia-mintreport1803
United States Mint — presidential transmittal, signed Benjamin Rush
p.15. The keystone: every coin struck to the end of 1805. Quarter-dollar column: 5,894 / 252 / [1798–1803 blank] / 6,738 / 121,394 — total 134,278, and the rows sum to the printed total exactly.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint
p.2. 220,643 quarter dollars (annual line). The quarterly detail prints 216,823 / 2,820 / — / —, which sums 1,000 short; the report's own value column proves the June figure is a compositor's slip for 3,820. Page image read 2026-08-24.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1807--ia-mintreport1807
United States Mint
Seven consecutive annual reports, each listing the denominations coined — and none including the quarter dollar. The longest gap in the series, evidenced year by year from the reports themselves (all held under the Archive's mint-report programme, zero gaps 1802–1933).
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive ids: mint-annual-report-1808--ia-mintreport1808, mint-annual-report-1809--ia-mintreport1809, mint-report-presidential-message-1810--ia-messagefrompresi1811unit, mint-report-presidential-message-1811--ia-messagefrompresi1812unit-t7p8, mint-report-presidential-message-1812--ia-messagefromthepr1813pres, mint-report-presidential-message-1813--ia-messagefromthepr1814pres, mint-report-presidential-message-1814--ia-messagefromthepr1815pres
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.5. "In silver coins, 69,232 pieces, amounting to 17,308 dollars." 69,232 × $0.25 = $17,308 exactly: the entire 1815 silver coinage was quarter dollars.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.5. "In silver coins, 67,153 pieces, amounting to 28,575 dollars and 75 cents" — uniquely solved as 47,150 half dollars + 20,003 quarter dollars.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-report-presidential-message-1816--ia-messagefrompresi1817unit-f8b8
United States Mint
p.1. 1,215,567 silver pieces, all half dollars; no quarters.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1817--ia-mintreport1817
United States Mint
p.1. 361,174 quarter dollars.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1818--ia-mintreport1818
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.5. Silver 2,352,000 pieces / $1,140,000 → 2,208,000 halves + 144,000 quarters.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.5. Silver 1,821,153 / $501,680.70 → 127,444 quarters.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.5. Silver 2,709,160 / $825,762.45 → 216,851 quarters.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint
p.1. 64,080 quarter dollars.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1822--ia-mintreport1822
United States Mint
p.1. 17,800 quarter dollars. The Archive's copy is a modern transcription whose coinage table is replaced by an editorial note, so the figure additionally rests on the FY1888 registry ($4,450.00) and on Dickeson's 1859 printing — both held.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1823--ia-mintreport1823
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.11. The settlement records 3,504,954 half dollars — the only silver denomination struck that year. The evidentiary basis for the 1824 blank.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.9. 168,000 quarter dollars (quarterly: — / — / — / 168,000) — the single delivery the trade partitions across the 1824/2 and 1825/4/2 dates.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint
pp.5–6. 4,004,180 half dollars, the entire silver coinage of the year — and the policy passages that explain every blank year in this series: coinage "exclusively [of] half dollars… leaving the circulation of small coins to be supplied by the accustomed fractions of the Spanish dollar."
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1826--ia-messagefrompresi1827unit-h9x6
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.7. 4,000 quarter dollars — the orphaned delivery.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.5. 102,000 quarter dollars (2,000 / 80,000 / 20,000 / —).
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint
p.1. Denomination list with no quarter dollars.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-report-presidential-message-1829--ia-mintreport1829
United States Mint
p.1. Denomination list with no quarter dollars.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1830--ia-mintreport1830
United States Mint
p.2. 398,000 quarter dollars — and Moore's forward promise: "it is proposed to make such a proportion, of denominations less than the half dollar, as will sensibly improve the condition of the currency."
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1831--ia-mintreport1831
United States Mint
p.1. 320,000 quarter dollars.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint
p.1. 156,000 quarter dollars.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1833--ia-mintreport1833
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.1. 286,000 quarter dollars.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-report-presidential-message-1834--ia-mintreport1834
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.5, Schedule A. 1,952,000 quarter dollars — the series' largest year.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.4, Statement A. 472,000 quarter dollars — in the report announcing steam coinage and fully hubbed dies.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.4, Statement A. 252,400 pieces / $63,100.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.4, Statement A. 832,000 pieces / $208,000 — one line covering both the Capped Bust and Liberty Seated types.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint
p.2. The Director on the 1853 weight reduction and the withdrawal of the old standard: issued at 116 4/11 cents per ounce against a metal price of 121 — "coin issued under the former standard would be withdrawn from circulation." The series' melt, from inside the building.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1853--ia-mintreportfor1853
United States Mint
pp.209–210. The official registry by calendar year, with the Director's own NOTE that it records deliveries, not dates. The quarter-dollar column is printed in value; every figure 1796–1831 was decoded ($1,473.50 = 5,894 … $25,500.00 = 102,000) and checked against the contemporaneous reports. All agree.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTArchive id: mint-annual-report-1888--ia-annualreportofdi1888unit-y8i7
United States Mint
p.173. The same registry table — a second printing of the record.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
United States Mint — presidential transmittal
p.8. The tabular statement carrying the 1806 delivery of 206,124 and corroborating the blank years.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
American Numismatic and Archaeological Society
p.336. The 1891 analysis quoting the Director's NOTE and listing the dates the printed figures literally require — three of the anomalies are quarter dollars: phantom 1797 and 1816, erased 1824. The record confirms all three. The author is probably William Sumner Appleton (PROBABLE, not confirmed).
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_ANALYSISArchive id: ajn-vols23-25-1888--ia-ajn1888vols23to25
Wayte Raymond, 489 Park Avenue, New York
THE standard reference — the B-numbers, ninety varieties on eight photographic plates, and a comparative coinage table that prints the Mint's delivery figures UNMERGED with marginal notes saying which dates the coins bear: the two-field mintage discipline, published in 1925. Public domain by US publication date; newly acquired for this series, with a rights record preserving Internet Archive's conflicting orphan-work boilerplate alongside the determination. Quote Browning on dies; check Browning on numbers — his 1823 figure is wrong by a factor of 6.6 and his 1831 paragraph is Snowden's 1860 sentence unattributed.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_REFERENCEView source ↗
John W. Haseltine
Lots 1298–1357: sixty-three varieties of 1796–1838 in full diagnostic prose — the only pre-1925 variety listing of this denomination, and the ancestor of the B-numbers. The 1831 note ("From this date, to the reverse of the 1838 Liberty seated, the olive branch has no berries") and the Liberty Seated break at lot 1358 both mark the series' structure.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_REFERENCEArchive id: haseltine-type-table-1881--ia-catalogueofjohnw00hase-0
J. B. Lippincott
pp.252–256 (printed 182–186), the by-date quarter-dollar treatment. Frequently wrong elsewhere and decisively right here: prints 5,894 (1796) and 252 (1797) as separate issues, 69,232 for 1815, and 17,800 for 1823 — the earliest located printing of the unmerged figures.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINSECONDARY_EARLYView source ↗
J. B. Lippincott — a Mint Director's publication
p.108: "In the year 1796, the quarter dollar and dime were added to the coinage. The first delivery of the former occurred on the ninth of April, amounting to 1800 pieces" — read out of the Mint's own bullion journals. p.110: the 1831 diameter reduction, the sentence Browning reproduces near-verbatim in 1925 without attribution.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_MINT_PUBLICATIONView source ↗
American Numismatic and Archaeological Society
Binding p.435 (vols. 6–10). The by-date type listing: "1823. Quarter-dollar. Similar to 1822. Die altered from 1822"; the 1827 "Similar to 1825"; and no quarter listed for 1826, 1829 or 1830 — an independent 1870s check on the blank years.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINCONTEMPORARY_ANALYSISArchive id: ajn-vols6-10-1871--ia-ajn1871vols06to10
New York Stamp & Coin Co.
Lot 975: "1827. Quarter Dollar: over '23: proof; an undoubted ORIGINAL" — the one link in this series' pedigree chains corroborated from a held public-domain primary. Also lots 954 (1824), 961 (1825), 983 (1828), NO 1826 quarter lot at all (consistent with the zero delivery), and in the pattern section: "1827 Quarter Dol. same as regular issue, but in copper: thick planchet: only 3 specimens known; uncirculated."
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_AUCTION_RECORDView source ↗
S. H. & H. Chapman
The quarter-dollar run at scan p.157. Held, unmined for this series — listed so the ledger says what has not been worked.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_AUCTION_RECORDArchive id: chapman-bushnell-1882--ia-catalogueofceleb00chap-0
W. Elliot Woodward
Held, unmined for this series.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_AUCTION_RECORDArchive id: woodward-mickley-1867-priced--ia-pricedcatalogueo00wood-9
American Numismatic Association
p.183. A dealer offering "1827 over 1823, restrike, uncir, $140" beside an 1805 at $30 and an 1807 at $31 — the Restrike sold openly as a restrike, priced above every regular date in the series.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_MARKET_RECORDArchive id: numismatist-vol19-1906--ia-thenumismatist1906vol19
American Numismatic Association
p.319. "Quarter Dollar, 1827, proof, restrike 210.00"; "Quarter Dollar. 1796, proof 42.00".
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_MARKET_RECORDArchive id: numismatist-vol35-1922--ia-thenumismatist1922vol35
American Numismatic Association
p.173. A collection notice: "Quarter Dollars include a brilliant proof 1796; one of the best 1823 and a proof of 1827" — the three coins the era treated as this series' summits, named together, a century ago.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINCONTEMPORARY_REPORTAGEArchive id: numismatist-vol28-1915--ia-thenumismatist1915vol28
United States Congress (compilation)
The statutory specification: "ninety-two grains and thirteen sixteenth parts of a grain of pure, or one hundred and four grains of standard silver" — weight and fineness fixed, diameter not mentioned, which is why the 1831 reduction needed no law. Corroborated verbatim in the Indianapolis Monetary Commission report of 1898, also held.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_LEGALView source ↗
Macmillan
p.523. The text of the Act of February 21, 1853 §§3–4: the Mint buys silver with the bullion fund and pays out subsidiary coin for gold — the structural change that ended the depositors' choice of denominations and made the quarter a permanent coin.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINSECONDARY_STANDARDView source ↗
D. Appleton
The arbitrage identity: subsidiary silver was strictly proportional to the dollar, so "all the silver used for small 'change,' the subsidiary coinage, disappeared from circulation."
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINSECONDARY_STANDARDView source ↗
E. A. Weeks
"from 1834 to 1853, even the subsidiary silver, the half-dollars, quarters and dimes, had been melted and exported" — the denomination named in the melt.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINSECONDARY_STANDARDView source ↗
The Assayers of the Mint
"Wear of our Silver Coins" and the June 1845 recoinage of pre-1837 silver — which discusses half dollars, dimes and half dimes and does not mention quarters at all: whatever came back for recoinage, the quarter was not a notable part of it.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_MINT_PUBLICATIONView source ↗
United States Congress
p.155. The ratio drift and the melting of full-weight American fractional silver.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINPRIMARY_GOVERNMENTView source ↗
American Numismatic Association
pp.34, 39, 51. The 1853 arrows-and-rays quarter that marks the weight reduction — the aftermath of this series.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINSECONDARY_STANDARDView source ↗
Collectors Universe / PCGS
Survival estimates ("an average of one or more experts' opinions… based on population reports, auction appearances, and personal knowledge"), Numismatic Rarity, auction records and condition census with pedigree, including die-variety pages carrying Browning numbers. All census figures on this site carry the class SURVIVAL ESTIMATE and the observation date 2026-08-24. Facts with attribution only; nothing quoted at length, no image used.
○ NOT HELDLIMITED USETERTIARY_COMMERCIALView source ↗
—
The modern revision of Browning, carrying his numbering forward with new marriages, die states and numeric rarity ratings. In copyright, not held; no figure from it is reproduced here.
○ NOT HELDLIMITED USEREFERENCE_ONLY
—
The other modern reference. In copyright, not held; no figure from it is reproduced here.
○ NOT HELDLIMITED USEREFERENCE_ONLY
B. Max Mehl
Deliberately not acquired. The Internet Archive copy sits in a restricted collection flagged "This is an in-copyright publication." OunceDesk's own reading of its rights policy would make a 1927 US publication public domain — but the Archive defers to the repository's access control regardless, and records the disagreement instead of resolving it by download.
○ NOT HELDLIMITED USEREFERENCE_ONLY
American Numismatic Society
Queried 2026-08-24. The documented query recipe that returns 75 early-dollar records returns ZERO for "Quarter Dollar" — and zero for "Half Dollar" too, which means the museum-image playbook's facet vocabulary must be discovered per denomination rather than assumed. A finding about the method, recorded as such; no ANS quarter photography exists to use.
○ NOT HELDPUBLIC DOMAINREPOSITORY_QUERY
Smithsonian National Numismatic Collection via Wikimedia Commons
Prefix sweep NNC-US-179 through NNC-US-183, run 2026-08-24: ONE quarter-dollar file in the whole range, and it is a 1792 pattern (Judd-12), four years before the denomination was struck. Coverage of the regular issues 1796–1838 on Commons: zero.
○ NOT HELDPUBLIC DOMAINREPOSITORY_QUERY
OunceDesk
Series totals, per-issue ranks and shares, survival rates, the 134,278 cross-check against the Mint's 1805 cumulative statement, the 1807 June-quarter correction, the metric equivalents of the statutory grain figures, and the Economite under-representation ratio. Labelled DERIVED wherever it appears.
● HELD IN THE ARCHIVEPUBLIC DOMAINOUNCEDESK_DERIVED
Catalogue cross-references
Every PCGS link on these pages was title-gated — and the sweep that produced them nearly published a false finding.
PCGS CoinFacts ignores the descriptive slug in a coin URL and keys only on the trailing number, so a link cannot be validated by status code; it has to be validated by reading the page's own title. Numbers 5300–5480 were swept on 2026-09-05 and every link below was resolved and title-checked. All thirty-two issues in this series have a page, which is unusual — the early half dollars have none for eleven of their thirty-nine.
- PCGS publishes a plain page for every one of this series' thirty-two issues, including all four blunder and overdate varieties. That is the opposite of the early half dollars, where eleven of thirty-nine dates have only variety pages — and it reflects a series whose rarity genuinely does live at the date level.
- The catalogue splits 1838 exactly as this series does: 5357 is the Capped Bust quarter and 5391 is the Liberty Seated, with the Liberty Seated category beginning at 5390. A commercial catalogue independently drawing the same boundary from the coins is worth recording, because the Mint's own delivery figure of 832,000 covers both and Browning refused to split it.
- PCGS carries proof pages for dates this series' research has not surveyed at all — among them proofs of the 1822 25/50C (5367), the 1823/2 (5368) and the 1838 Capped Bust (5386). The research pack records that no proof survey was assembled; these pages are where one would start.
- A first sweep using Node's fetch returned 181 numbers with zero titles, because PCGS answers Node with HTTP 403 and curl with 200. Re-probing the empties WITH THE STATUS RECORDED separated three different things hiding behind “no title”: 31 genuine absences (302), 17 pages that had simply not answered (200) and 10 rate-limited requests (403). One of the 200s was the 1818/5 — which the first pass had recorded as having no page at all. Absence is claimed here only for 302s.
Ten numbers in the swept range still returned 403 after a slower second pass (5319, 5320, 5361, 5370, 5379, 5387, 5395, 5419, 5424, 5464). Nothing is claimed about them in either direction: they are neither linked nor counted as absent. Swept 2026-09-05; the number-to-title map is committed with the build scripts so the gate can be re-run.
Negative disclosure
Sources deliberately not used
- Auction-house listing pages. Heritage, Stack's Bowers, Legend and GreatCollections lot pages are blocked to automated retrieval or barred by their terms. Every auction date and price on these pages traces to a public-domain catalogue or periodical held in the Archive (Parmelee 1890; The Numismatist of 1906, 1915 and 1922) or to PCGS's own fields, attributed as such.
- The Mehl 1927 Haseltine reprint (S33). Catalogued and deliberately not downloaded: the repository flags it in-copyright and restricts access. OunceDesk's own rights reading would make a 1927 US publication public domain — the access control is deferred to anyway, and the disagreement is the record.
- Numista. Not queried for this series at all — neither data nor images.
- Population-report data. Grading-service population reports are proprietary. Everything on these pages is a survival estimate, attributed and dated — and two of PCGS's auction-record fields (the 1804 and 1819 Large 9, both frozen since March 1980) are flagged as stale rather than rendered as current prices.
- Constructed URLs. None, anywhere. Every link on this page was tested and observed to resolve on 2026-08-30; identifiers that did not resolve are shown as identifiers.
- Wikipedia. Orientation only; never a proximate citation for anything published here.
How to read the classifications
OBSERVED — directly reported by a primary or authoritative source: statutes, Mint reports, the Comptroller's settlements, a Director reading his own bullion journals, a priced auction catalogue. ESTIMATED — expert estimates with a stated methodology, such as PCGS's survival figures; the figure is reported and the estimator named. DERIVED — OunceDesk arithmetic or synthesis over observed inputs, labelled as ours (D1). SPECULATIVE — scenario reasoning, always flagged; there is none in this ledger.
Three attribution rules specific to this series
Quote Browning on dies; check Browning on numbers. The standard reference is held and quotable at length, and its die descriptions are first-hand — but its 1823 mintage is wrong by a factor of 6.6, its narrative merges what its own table separates, and its 1831 history paragraph is Snowden's sentence unattributed. Where Browning is load-bearing on a number, the number is checked against the Mint's record and the check is shown.
Survival, rarity, census, records and pedigree are PCGS's — and its internal disagreements travel with the figures: the two 1827/3 Original price fields that contradict each other, and the census overlap in which two chains claim one auction lot, are registered contradictions, not smoothed averages. Mintages are neither PCGS's nor Browning's: they are the Mint's delivery figures, and where the trade shows more resolution than the record it is always a merge, a partition or an invention — never independent data.
Single-source items say so, in place. The 1867 Cogan–Reakirt census letter and the $227 Woodward sale of 1864 both rest on PCGS's condition-census field alone; each is flagged single-source everywhere it appears, and the one pedigree link this series can corroborate from a held primary — Parmelee 1890, lot 975 — is identified as exactly that.
Corrections: research@ouncedesk.com — research that can't survive being wrong in public isn't research.
Evidence at a glance
OBSERVED
57 sources
ESTIMATED
1 source
DERIVED
1 source
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: series overviewthe Browning bookvarieties & the plateskey dates & survival