The rich legacy of the CC Mint includes rare Morgan dollars that are scarce, as well as rarities that are not scarce. Huh? Some of the mintages are relatively large, while others seem almost impossible to acquire. So then why is the lowest mintage coin, the 1885-CC (228,000), not very expensive in UNC while the 1892-CC (1.3 million) is thousands of dollars in UNC?
Silver dollars were used in everyday commerce, but the number produced far exceeded those actually needed. Thus hundreds of millions of Morgan dollars sat around in 1,000-coin bags in vaults.
The Treasury release of Morgan dollars
The 'Treasury release' saw silver dollars being sold to consumers at face value. People could buy a single coin, a dozen or a 1,000-coin bag. This started when silver dollars were still being minted, when casinos bought bags of them for their gaming tables. The Treasury halted the distribution in March of 1964. By that time, however, there were only three million silver dollars left. Most of them were brilliant uncirculated Morgan dollars with the CC mint mark of the Wild West. Many of them have beautiful rainbow toning.
GSA mail bids for Carson City Morgan dollars
What the Treasury release started, the GSA (General Service Administration) finished. GSA coins are housed in a large rectangular plastic case with black felt. Four mail bids were held by the GSA from October of 1972 to June of 1974. That emptied the vaults of two million CC Morgan dollars.
The final one million CC’s were sold via GSA mail bids during the speculative silver madness of 1980. The sale of these millions of coins through the 1962-1964 Treasury release and the GSA turned the hobby on its head. It was nothing short of a numismatic revolution!
1885-CC Morgan Dollar
Most of the 1885-CC dollars were bagged and stored. About 80,000 of them were sold in bags up to 1964. When the dust cleared, the GSA had the remaining 148,285 (65.03% of the entire mintage!), which they subsequently sold to the public. That accounts for their relatively low price in UNC in relation to the entire mintage. It’s a true rarity, but far too many examples exist for it to be scarce!
1892-CC Morgan Dollar
The 1892-CC, however, with its mintage of 1.3 million is a scarcity. How is that so? Many of them were released into circulation in 1892. The number of coins in government vaults numbered in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands, as was the case with the 1885-CC coins. Bowers tells us that “many bags were paid out over a long period of years, including in 1926-1927, accelerating in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Most of these went into circulation.” In 1955, about 50 bags were sold. All but one coin was gone by the time the GSA sales began.
End of the Carson City Mint
The 677,000 Morgan dollars of 1893 were the last coins produced at the Carson City Mint. “By direction of the secretary of the Treasury coinage operations at the Mint at Carson City was suspended on June 1, 1893.” Why was there a need to close down this branch mint? The annual report of the director of the Mint continues, “The mint at Carson City being of limited capacity...the expenses for coinage were much greater at Carson than at San Francisco.”
