A ‘Legendary’ 132-Year-Old Dime Recently Sold for More Than $1.2 Million at Auction. What Makes It So Extraordinary?
Only 24 of the 1894-S Barber dimes were minted in San Francisco in June 1894, and just nine known specimens exist today
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A 132-year-old coin has sold for $1.25 million at auction.
The coin is an 1894-S Barber dime, “one of the classic rarities in all of numismatics,” according to Stack’s Bowers Galleries, which conducted the September 1 sale. Ranked fourth in the popular 100 Greatest U.S. Coins reference guide, the dime is named after Charles E. Barber, who designed it while serving as the sixth chief engraver of the United States Mint from 1879 to 1917.
Today’s U.S. dime features a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, 1894-S Barber dimes depict Lady Liberty on one side and a wreath with the words “One Dime” on the other. A small “s” sits below the wreath.
Only 24 of the 1894-S Barber dimes were minted in San Francisco in June 1894, and three were reserved for assay—testing to ensure they met legal and manufacturing standards—leaving a net mintage of just 21 coins.
Why so few? Only a year earlier, the San Francisco Mint had produced 2,491,401 dimes. It expected demand to remain strong in 1894, but by then the nation was in the midst of a deep recession known as the Panic of 1893. As the economy contracted, demand for newly minted coins plummeted—and the San Francisco Mint ultimately stopped producing dimes for nearly half the year, according to Stack’s Bowers Galleries.
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In honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Mint is producing a special “Emerging Liberty” dime this year. It marks the first time Lady Liberty has appeared on the dime since 1945.Today, experts know of only nine examples of the 1894-S Barber dime, and most are typically held by private collectors for decades—meaning opportunities to purchase them are few and far between. Before the Stack’s Bowers offering, just five 1894-S Barber dimes had come up for purchase since 2005, selling for $1.3 million to $2.16 million, according to the auction house.
The newly sold 1894-S Barber dime holds special significance for Q. David Bowers, who co-founded the firm that would eventually become Stack’s Bowers Galleries. In November 1957, at age 19, he purchased the dime for $4,750—which, at the time, was a “seemingly ridiculous price,” Bowers wrote for Coin World in 2016.
“This caused a sensation, and my story was carried in hundreds of newspapers nationwide,” he wrote. “I received over 6,000 letters from readers.”
Bowers, then a student at Penn State, was invited to appear on the Today show, taking an all-expenses-paid trip to New York to visit NBC’s studios. The dime made him famous, helping launch the “greatest career American numismatics has ever seen,” according to a statement from the auction house.
Bowers and his business partner, Jim Ruddy, then sold the dime for $6,000 to Emery Mae Norweb, whose family held on to the coin until October 1987, when Stack’s Bowers auctioned it for $77,000. It sold again in 1990 for $93,500.
In total, the coin has appeared at only four auctions—all conducted by Stack’s Bowers Galleries. This year, it was sold from the collection of Charles Litman.
According to the auction house, “the mere mention of this coin is enough to attract the attention of even casual collectors of United States coinage.”
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