A 1795 Half Dime For Your Grading Estimates.

Your grade was not offensive, and I understand your point about having not seen coins like this before. Nowadays these coins are seldom seen in small coin shows and shows. I've been collecting U.S. from this era since the early 1970s.

The point is you should get a copy of the ANA Grading Guide or the book by Dave Bowers and study it a bit. Who knows? Some day you might find a coin like this in Granma's old trunk. Most dealers are going to pay you as little as they can. Why start out under grading the coin and ending up with less money that you should get? A quick comparison with the pictures in the guide can do wonders for you.

The "little old lady" who had this coin, from what I've heard didn't have much of anything else, but there it was!

I have what some people believe to be the finest known example of the 1838-C half eagle. That coin sat in a truck, in an attic, in New Hampshire for many years, unknown to numismatic collectors. The lady who had this family hoard (There were of number of other gold coins in addition to this one.) dug them out and tried to price the group using a Red Book. She came up with a number and offered them to a New Hampshire dealer.

She stated her price for all the coins, and he responded with a number that was four time higher! In this case honest cost him because she got scared, picked up the whole group and left. Subsequently she made some less than advantageous trades but eventually met up with Heritage auctions. They got the coins graded, and I ended up with the piece at auction.

Not all stories end up happy like this one. People make assumptions, end up going to the wrong people and get a fraction of what they should have gotten. Other people have their heads in the clouds and way over value what they have. It's hard to know who is honest when you don't know the market or have the skills to evaluate coins properly.

Most every coin has hairlines and marks. The question is are they going in a consistent direction, which could be swirl with whizzing, that indicate that the coin has been cleaned? Just because a coin has few thin scratches does not indicate that it has been cleaned. Storage on a velvet lined tray in a coin cabinet can impart hairlines as the coins moved on the tray as the drawers were pushed in and out. Careless insertions and removal in a coin flip can impart hairlines. Some of the worst of all hairlines come from album slide windows.

The 1795 Half Dime is not as rare as you might think. There are probably 2,000 to 3,000 at least. The PCGS "Coin Facts" site says there are 1,750 of them. I think that number is low because of the number of pieces I've seen at shows over the years. What you see offered for sale is only the tip of the ice berg. Quite often for every coin you see for sale, there are many, many more sitting in collections and accumulations. As I said earlier, this is the most common date in the early Half Dime series (1794 - 1805). The next most common date is the 1800.

The guys at PCGS might recognize the same coin, but they probably see at least several 1795 Half Dimes a week. At least they did before a lot of them were graded.

On top of that, a hoard of about 100 Mint State (+ or -) pieces came on the market in the 1960s. When I first saw this one, I thought that it came from the hoard. I learned the rest of the story from Billy Paul.

Edited to add:

Some very scarce coins get submitted to PCGS time after time. I know of one 1854-D Three Dollar Gold piece, (which is much rarer than the 1795 Half Dime) that was submitted to PCGS six times to get the much coveted Mint State grade. It's been done with quite a few AU graded 1854-D $3 gold coins. In fact it's been done so much that the population reports make you think that the 1854-D $3 gold is much more common than it really is. Those AU grade populations are inflated by repeat submissions of the same coins.

Bill, that is a great coin! Love the toning, surfaces, and the die crack is another plus in my book. The great story that goes with the coin is fantastic! Beautiful coin!!