Hey, sorry that I have not made another blog post outside of Guess the Grade Coin of the Day in quite a while as I have been extremely busy. Fortunately, I am back to talk a little about seated dimes, and the various changes in designs that they went through! Believe it or not, seated dimes (which were minted bu the US from 1837-1891) went through multiple different design changes! This idea first arose in my mind, after I just received a package consisting of a lot of 10 seated dimes that I purchased online. The coins were minted in dates dates ranging from 1848-1890 (with none of the 1853-1855 with arrows variety). Interestingly, I was able to spot 3 major design changes! After some studying, the seated dime series actually has gone through five different design changes, which are discussed in the article below! To provide some background about the coin, the seated liberty dime was originally designed by Christinan Golbrechet in 1837 and first minted during that same year. At the time, dimes were worth a lot especially considering that during the late 1830s America was in an economic depression, where a single ten cents was equivalent to about two hours worth of manual labor for many people. This coin was very useful in the American economy, because of the design and technological changes that caused the coins to be fairly uniform, with very few differences being between one coin and the next. This was very different from coins of previous eras, where various design elements, such as the berries on the reverse of cents or half cents had to be punched into working dies by hand, which created variations between each die that produced coins. This uniformity made it more difficult to counterfeit these coins. The uniformity was increased even more, because these coins were produced utilizing a closed collar which was a technique first introduced in 1828. The first design change occurred in 1838, where 13 stars were added to the obverse of the coin. Interestingly, this design change was made because of public controversy that arose after the coin was first minted, where people believed that the coins should have the traditional 13 stars on the coin to represent the original 13 colonies, which was not present on dimes from 1837. Interestingly, the next major design change did not occur until 1853 due to the California gold rush! Throughout the gold rush, there was a very large influx of gold on the open market. At the time coins were minted with their purity and weight standards being based on the ratio of gold to silver (ex: 16 ounces of silver was worth the same as one ounce of gold). The influx of gold in the market naturally changed this ratio where people could melt their silver coins, and trade them in at the mint to get gold coins at a profit! Due to this, in 1853, the mint changed this by decreasing the metal content of silver coins by about 7%, and they added the arrows by the date to signify this change, where the arrows were present on the seated dimes until 1855!
The next major design change did not come about until 1860 they changed the obverse and reverse of the seated dime. They replaced the 13 stars that were on the obverse with the words "United States of America" which was originally on the reverse! To fill the space that was left, they increased the size of the wreath! This wreath was known as a "wreath of cereals" which consisted of various plants such as leaves of corn, maple leaves, oak, and wheat. They made this design change because, unfortunately the stars that were on the obverse oftentimes caused the design on the dime to not strike up properly, due to raised portions of the dime being present on opposite sides of each other on the coin. This design change lasted until the end of the series, except for 1873 and 1874. During these two years, they added arrows around the date to signify the increase in weight of the dimes, which occurred in 1873. After 1874, they resumed with the original design from 1860, with the increased weight! After this point no design change was made until they introduced barber dimes, which were minted from 1892-1916! I really hoped that you enjoyed this post! Please leave any questions comments or concerns in the comment section below, and image credit goes to Heritage Auctions! Furthermore, research was done regarding this information primarily utilizing internet resources from NGC.
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Author: Brandon Spiegel.
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