The Comstock Lode and the Morgan Dollar
One of the things numismatists are prone to do from time to time is take a handful of change and sort through it for rare dimes, nickels and quarters. Oftentimes, we don’t turn up much of anything, but other times we might get lucky and find an incorrectly stamped quarter. These are fun little collector’s oddities, rarely worth more than say, ten or twenty dollars if they’re in good condition, but they don’t really amount to real rare coin investments.
Every serious rare coin investor is also a collector, a coin buff. You have to develop a degree of knowledge regarding the rare coins you’re investing in, and you can’t help but become fascinated by the history of these coins.
For serious investments though, you will, of course, want to stick to rare gold coins and certified rarities and so on.
Luckily, the Lady Liberty rare coins, the Morgan silver dollars and the St. Gaudens coins are amongst the most fascinating when you take a look at their history, so when you buy rare coins such as these, you’re buying not only a solid investment, but an interesting story. This is true of the Saint Gaudens rare coins and the Morgan dollars alike.
To get into the Morgan silver dollars, this begins with the Comstock Lode. The Comstock Lode was the greatest silver strike in history, discovered in the late 1850’s in Nevada. This strike actually put a serious drop on the value of silver, it was so large, and forced Congress to pass the Bland-Allison act, requiring the Treasury to purchase vast amounts of silver to strike as coins. And so, they decided to strike the silver in the form of one dollar coins.
Many of these silver dollars wound up being melted after the introduction of the Peace Dollar. This is not because of any law requiring that they be melted down, but rather, because of their silver bullion content. Many holders of these dollars opted to melt their coins down in response to the rise in silver prices, thanks to the fact that the dollars were largely comprised of silver bullion.
Ironically, this actually made the coins themselves more valuable than their actual silver content. If you purchase rare coins today, you will only find so many of the original Morgan Dollars around. To compare this with modern currency, consider that the penny contains more than a penny’s worth of copper. Now, if everyone in the US melted down their pennies and sold off the copper, then the last dozen or so pennies remaining would be pretty valuable.
With the reproductions many of us invest in today, we’re mainly purchasing the metal content as an investment for the future, and this will, of course, be subject to the metal prices of the day. Truly rare coins, on the other hand, do not somehow become less rare over time.
Joseph Morton
April 5, 2009
