Chasing West Point Quarters

My name is Derrick Engler aka @okiecoins on Instagram. I am a 19-year-old numismatist from Southeastern Oklahoma. I have been collecting since 2017. One day I was eating lunch at my high school and a kid walked up to me with a coin collection. He let me look through it, and I bought an Eisenhower Dollar for $5. At the time I did not even know what an Eisenhower Dollar was – I just thought it looked cool. At that point I was hooked on coin collecting!

I woke up one morning in early April 2019 to see a United States Mint article on quarters bearing the West Point (“W”) mint mark. I got excited when I read that there would be only 2 million minted per design. I was given a loan from my grandparents so I could start buying uncirculated boxes from the bank. At this point it was early June and the War in the Pacific Quarters were about to be released. One day I went to one of my local banks and I was amazed when they said they had an uncirculated box of them. I purchased the $500 box from the bank, went home, and searched through it. I ended up finding 25 West Point Quarters! I went back to the bank and got the rest of the boxes they had. In all, I landed over 150 War in the Pacific West Point Quarters!

After new releases of the 2019 War in the Pacific Quarter started dwindling, I was in search of the 2019 San Antonio Missions Quarters and found three boxes of them. My findings totaled approximately 60 of them. Once I could not find any more, I set my eyes on the 2019-W River of No Return Quarters. The River of No Return quarters is where I hit the lottery. I found over 10 boxes of them and in turn found over 250 of them.

At this point it was February 2020 and my luck was fizzling out. In April 2020, to my surprise the U.S. Mint published an article detailing their release of 2020 Quarters bearing a W mint mark and V75 privy mark. I was excited! A few weeks later, I returned to my bank and purchased a few boxes and saw the 2020 Weir Farm Quarters. I looked through the boxes and found over 100 of them with the W mint mark. I could not find any W Quarters for the next six months. It was November 2020, and the Tallgrass Prairie Quarters represented my last chance for finding the 2020-W Quarters in new boxes. Two weeks after the Mint released the 2020 Tallgrass Prairie Quarters, I scored a box from the bank! I searched through the box and found 35. In the following weeks I combed through eight boxes and scored more than 150 Tallgrass Prairie Quarters boasting the W mint mark.

In my two years of searching for the West Point Quarters, I estimate that I found around 1,000 of them. My favorite West Point Quarter is a PCGS-graded MS66 River of No Return Quarter with the First Week of Discovery attribution and the label signed by Emily S. Damstra. Most of the quarters I found were sold online, and I kept the nicest coins I found from each design. The money I made from selling the West Point Quarters gave me a jumpstart on the U.S. type set that I am still working on today.