Morgan Dollar Sells For Over $2 Million

The finest example of the rarest Morgan silver dollar sold on August 29 at auction for $2,086,875 – a new record for the series and the first coin to garner over $2 million! The coin is graded PCGS MS67 CAC.

The undisputed key date coin of the entire Morgan silver dollar series that ran from 1878 to 1904 and then came back for a year in 1921 is the 1893-S coin. It is also the most popular coin in the series largely because it has been known to be the lowest mintage coin by far for so long.

This issue was struck during the famous economic crisis of 1893 known as “the panic of 1893,” which had a variety of causes, including the crashing of wheat and other commodity prices and the bursting of the bubble of railroads, which had been vastly overbuilt in the years leading up to this crisis. There was also an oversupply of silver from Western mines (some of which was used to strike all those Morgan dollars in excess of what was needed for commerce) that led to a debate about how much of our coinage should be made from that metal.

Those developments contributed to the collapse of two of the country’s largest employers, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the National Cordage Company, and this heightened economic uncertainty was followed by bank runs as people rushed to get their money out of banks.

In this context, the need for silver dollars was further diminished, which led the U.S. Mint to produce just 1.5 million coins at all four branch mints that year, and that included a mere 100,000 coins at the San Francisco Mint.

1893 Morgans from other mints are also some of the most desirable coins such as the  1893-CC, 1893-P and 1893-0.

Plus, many of those 100,000 1893-S coins are believed to have been melted down under the Pittman Act of 1918 that authorized the melting of up 350 million Morgan silver dollars to be sold in silver bars to Great Britain at the price of $1 an ounce to help stabilize that country’s economy against an effort by Germany to manipulate the price of silver. It also called for an equivalent number of new silver dollars be made from U.S.-sourced silver, which led to all those 1921 Morgan dollars and the Peace dollars.

Today, there are 7,119 examples in all grades graded by PCGS, and another 3,473 graded by NGC with the vast majority of those coins being circulated ones. In mint state the coin is a real rarity with just 37 graded by PCGS and one Prooflike coin plus 28 by NGC and 2 PL’s. It has long been estimated that not much more than 100 mint state examples still exist.

There may also be some coins graded by other services or possibly even some raw examples.

Ownership History

The coin that sold recently was part of the legendary collection of Jack Lee, who is widely known to have put together the all-time finest set of Morgan dollars. This example was the first Morgan dollar to sell for over $1 million.

Lee assembled a set of 175 of the finest Morgans, sold the collection and then later collected the whole set again! Each coin in his collection has its pedigree noted on the grading label.

This coin was first introduced into the coin market in 2001 when the collection of collector Cornelius Vermeule III, an art curator and author of Numismatic Art in America, was sold. In that first auction it was sold ungraded and listed as Gem Brilliant Uncirculated, fetching $414,000, a real bargain compared to today’s value for the piece.

In was next offered in 2017 after having been purchased in 2008 for over $1 million but went unsold in that auction because it failed to reach its presale estimate of $1.3-1.5 million.

A small hoard of 20 or so mint state examples of this rarity was discovered in the early 1960s at a bank in Great Falls, Montana, but no large hoards have ever been reported, and this coin was not part of the amazing Treasury hoard of bags of mint state coins discovered in their vaults in the early 1960s.

Dave Bowers said that probably sometime after 1925 thousands of circulated examples that graded around Very Fine were discovered in Rocky Mountain states where these large silver coins circulated more widely than in most other parts of the country.

It is important to understand that many fake examples have been reported over the years, typically created by taking an 1893-P coin and adding an “S” mintmark. NGC calls it one of the top 10 most counterfeit American coins, so beware! That is why it is absolutely imperative that only coins professionally graded and preferably by either PCGS or NGC be purchased, especially for a coin like this.

Walter Breen once said he had heard of someone who had a full bag of this date, but Bowers did feel enough evidence existed for those coins to include them in his estimate of how many coins exist.

1893-S Morgan Value

PCGS values this issue in Good 4 at $2,500, Fine 12 at $4,250, XF40 at $10,000 and AU55 at $43,50. Then it jumps to $425,000 in MS63, $475,000 in MS64, $750,000 in MS65 and $2,250,000 in MS67.

For most collectors a nice VF under $3,000 or an XF under $10,000 would probably be a good goal for this famous key date unless they can afford to acquire one of the truly rare mint state coins.