Where Do Coin Mintage Figures Come From?

By Roger W. Burdette, special to CoinWeek …..
 

Modern coin quantities come from press releases and annual reports of the United States Mint. Reports of the Director of the Mint for years beginning about 1873, following a reorganization of Mint operations, are the source for circulation coin data through and beyond the 1960s. Those prized “Proof Coin” mintages, consisting of anywhere from a dozen to a few thousand pieces per year, were mostly provided by the Mint Bureau in 1939 to numismatic publisher Wayte Raymond.

But when we look at Director’s Reports published before 1873, we see mintages given by Government Fiscal Years – July 1 to June 30 of the next calendar year. This makes trying to figure out the number of coins made bearing any specific date somewhat confusing. Also, it was common practice to hold coins in the final days of December and deliver them during the first part of January. It appears as if these coins were made and dated in January rather than the actual production date in December of the previous year. To add to the confusion, it was common practice until the late 1840s for mints (especially the branch facilities) to use dies during the first part of the following year, even though they now had the wrong date.

There is no simple answer. However, there are a couple of seldom used data sources, one of which called the “Paying Teller’s Blotter” (PTB) might help update coin mintages in the 1850s and ’60s. This short example might be helpful.

We mentioned above that there were (and still are) two kinds of “year” when dealing with the U.S. Mint. The first, well known to us all, is the calendar year, which runs from January 1 to December 31. All the days are in the same year, and all the coins made during this year are supposed to have the same date.

The second kind of year is a fiscal year, which splits a normal year into two parts: one in an initial calendar year and the remaining months in the following year. Fiscal Year (FY) 1861 began July 1, 1860, and ended June 30, 1861, so the first half had coins dated “1860” and the second half had coins dated “1861”.

If we go to the 1861 Director’s Annual Report for the fiscal year, we find a table like this, for FY 1861.

This is nice for anyone keeping the financial books, but it’s not a lot of help for us coin collectors. We know that some of these coins were made in the last half of 1860, and others in the first half of 1861, but it tells us nothing about the mintages of each date. We still don’t know how many coins were struck in 1860.

Here’s where the PTB might help. The blotter is just a cash transaction journal – money coming in, money going out. Every time the Chief Coiner delivered coins to the Mint Treasurer, the Paying Teller entered this into his journal. Here’s part of a typical page.

This means that the Paying Teller made entries for every day that money came in or out. Therefore, whenever the Chief Coiner delivered coins it should have appeared in this journal.
Using this journal, we separate the calendar years 1860 and 1861 into two halves and reconstruct the FY 1861 coinage to see if it matches the Mint’s 1861 report.

From left to right, we have the denominations then the first half of FY 1861; then the second half of FY 1861; then the deduction of Proof coins, which were handled by the Medal Department and not part of circulating coinage. Third from the right is our FY 1861 total as extracted from the PTB. Second from right is the official FY 1861 coinage total for the Philadelphia Mint copied from the Director’s Annual Report as of June 30, 1861. The far right column shows the differences between the official report and the PTB data.

A cursory examination shows significant differences between the official coin mintage report and the teller’s blotter. The PTB and quantities reported to the Mint Director were subject to daily verification and audit. Fiscal Year data was supposed to come from monthly coinage reports. However, the “errors” in the FY tables are too large to be simple mistakes and might point to some other factor we don’t understand. Presently, it’s difficult to explain the discrepancies.

As an alternative, let’s look at the PTB versus our standard reference, the Guide Book of United States Coins (the Red Book). This table shows the Philadelphia Mint coinage delivered (PTB) for 1860 and the Guide Book’s quantities for the same year.

Almost all quantities match between the PTB and the Guide Book. Of the four discrepancies, the quarter eagle difference is an overage of four pieces or $20, according to Guide Book. The cent difference is an underreport of 234,000 pieces or $2,340. This is an unusual amount for 1860 Indian Head Cents, which normally were delivered in multiples of $1,000 (100,000 coins). The dime presents a greater difference with the Guide Book, showing 135,000 pieces less than the PTB for a difference of $13,500.

Finally, we come to double eagles. The Guide Book shows 1,666 pieces more than PTB for a difference of $33,320. These last discrepancies are so large that the cause cannot be attributed to ordinary bookkeeping errors.

Some or all of the differences might be related to assumptions about the date on coins delivered on the days before and after New Year’s, but PTB original data for 1860 include no questionable entries. The final days of 1859 were checked, as were the first days of 1861. Nothing was found for 1859, and January 1861 had two unusual deliveries of cents. One was for 30,000 coins on January 3, and the other for 70,000 pieces on the seventh. Together, these totaled 100,000 pieces – the usual delivery quantity for cents.

* * *