1873-CC $1 Liberty Seated Silver Dollar PCGS AU-55 ~ extremely rare and in the Condition Census.

1873-CC Liberty Seated Dollar, Carson City Mint, Nevada. Christian Gobrecht, designer. Silver, .900 fine; 26.73 g; 38.1 mm; reeded edge. Breen-5495. Obverse 1 (Closed 3) / Reverse D. Graded AU-55 by the Professional Coin Grading Service.

The Coinage Act of February 12, 1873 presented itself as housekeeping — a reorganization of the Mint, a pruning of the two-cent piece, the three-cent silver, and the half dime. It also struck the standard silver dollar from the roster of authorized coins, substituting a heavier Trade dollar meant for the China trade, and in ending the free coinage of silver placed the United States on a de facto gold standard. Western silver interests would later memorialize the measure as the "Crime of '73." The Act took effect April 1. In the ten weeks preceding, three mints struck the last standard silver dollars the nation would produce for six years: 293,600 at Philadelphia, 2,300 at Carson City, and a recorded 700 at San Francisco, of which not one survives. Carson City's coinage came in two deliveries — 1,000 in January, 1,300 shortly after, which Rusty Goe places on February 13, the day after President Grant signed the Act abolishing them. All 2,300 issued from a single die pair: one obverse bearing the Closed 3 logotype, married to a reverse held over from 1870, its widely spaced CC mintmark set close to the eagle's feather tip and stem. It was the last die marriage of a design that had run since 1840.

The fate of the issue is unsettled and likely unsettleable. Bowers, reasoning backward from survivors, held that no more than 1,000 reached circulation and perhaps as few as 750, the balance melted at Carson City after April 1873; R.W. Julian countered that the full delivery was paid out, then redeposited weeks later as bullion for Trade dollar coinage. The distinction mattered little to the coins, which were consumed as metal within months of their striking, whether in the mint's own crucibles or in the Orient. Survivors have never been counted with confidence — Gobrecht Journal contributors put the figure below fifty in the 1980s; Goe now estimates 85 to 105 in all grades; PCGS carries a survival estimate of 200 and a rarity of R-7.0. The 1871-CC has the lower mintage, at 1,376. The 1873-CC has the lower survival, and it is the Carson City dollar that stops most collections. Certification has been unkind to its upper register: the celebrated Harold Bareford specimen, catalogued by Breen as Uncirculated, returned from NGC as AU-58. The condition census accordingly runs MS65, MS61, MS60, then a five-way tie at AU58 — a tier that includes the Eliasberg coin, traceable through Goldschmidt, New York Coin & Stamp, and the two Clapps. The present example sits immediately beneath that census, within the first dozen or so known.

Compare this coin at $107,500 with another currently offered on Collectors Corner at $142,500-!

Carson City dollars are typically well struck, though weakness at Liberty's head and chest is not unusual, and the word LIBERTY on the shield was rendered more shallowly than at Philadelphia and effaced quickly under wear. This piece shows the expected softness at the highest points of the head and at several obverse star centrils. The obverse carries natural silver-gray toning deepening to grayish-tan, with specks of olive-russet patina; the reverse retains a brilliant-gray field yielding to gold-tan over the devices. Trivial marks and wispy hairlines are consistent with the grade, and two individually noteworthy abrasions lie in the obverse field to the right of Liberty, between elbow and knee — the incidental record of a coin that did, briefly, the work coins are made for. A closing footnote belongs to the issue's folklore: Breen reported three Uncirculated examples recovered from a Carson City cornerstone around 1973, while Reno dealer Frank Roza, Jr. told of a construction worker who walked in with a tobacco tin of CC coins pulled from inside a wall of the Nevada State Museum — the old mint building itself. Bowers excluded them from his population estimates. The building that made them appears to have kept a few back.