1887-S $1, PL (Regular Strike)

The 1887-S Morgan Dollar

The San Francisco Mint struck 1,771,000 1887-S Morgan Dollars (#7180), a total far lower than the mintages produced that year at the Philadelphia or New Orleans Mints. Earlier in the decade, the San Francisco Mint was expected to carry a significant portion of the load, working to fulfill the congressional mandate of approximately $2 million in silver dollars per month. However, a storage crisis quickly emerged because the coins simply weren't needed in local commerce. By 1884, the San Francisco Mint was running out of vault space, causing the bulk of annual silver dollar production to shift back east.

Vintage Market Snippets

LaVere Redfield, of Morgan Dollar Hoard fame, was an eccentric multimillionaire who had a distinct love for hard money and an equally distinct distaste for spending it or paying his "fair share" of taxes. During the Great Depression, he built a fortune by purchasing stocks, bonds, and real estate at rock-bottom prices. In 1935, he moved to Reno, Nevada, where he bought a 15-room river-rock mansion on Mount Rose St. It was here, hidden behind a false wall in his basement, that a massive hoard of over 400,000 silver dollars was discovered in 1974, just months after his death.

In 1976, the hoard was sold intact at auction for $7.3 million, with A-Mark Corporation submitting the winning bid. Q. David Bowers, head of Bowers and Ruddy Galleries, was the underbidder, tapping out at $7.2 million. As for the coins themselves, the most common bags consisted of the 1879-S (#7092), 1880-S (#7118), 1881-S (#7130), 1882-S (#7140), 1896 (#7240), 1897 (#7246), and 1897-S (#7250) issues. The 1887-S was one of the better dates in the deal, yielding an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 pieces. Most were in typical-to-choice BU (Brilliant Uncirculated) condition, which today would grade between PCGS MS62 and PCGS MS64. For virtually any other 19th-century coin, the sudden introduction of 8,000 to 10,000 uncirculated examples in the 1970s would have permanently suppressed the market. This was not the case for the widely collected Morgan Dollar series. When Paramount distributed the coins, the market value of the 1887-S softened temporarily but quickly recovered. Collectors then and now consider the issue a better date than the more common releases. The date remains scarce enough that when Russell Augustin and I developed our "Morgan 50" composite, we included the 1887 (#7172) and 1887-O (#7176), but excluded the 1887-S.

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