How Did Coins From The Mid 1800-S Survive In Such High Grades.

In simple general terms, they were hoarded, and never circulated after that.

It is still possible (although rarely), to obtain ancient coins in 'as struck' condition.

Look at it this way , when one finds a 1959 Lincoln Cent today in CH-AU Red we holder it and store it away .Then it gets passed down multiple times. So in the year 2117 it was finally sold to a dealer , a newbie comes along in 2118 and buys it and says to himself how the heck did this ''Penny'' stay in such great condition after all these years ?

Since China is still making them, naturally they all look new.

As a coin dealer in the Midwest, I see lots of this.

Moxking gives some real good examples.

Others are that people were often given coins at the time of birth. We still do it today. Often those coins survive in high AU to MS.

Something else, during the "great melt" a few years ago, there were a surprising number of Hoards brought in. While I know that at the height of the GM, dealers were sending them in to be melted as fast as they came in, I know at least two refineries that paid people to go through the coins brought in for melting to pull MS or certain series such as CBH. As a result there are a lot more of these coins in the collector world than there were before the great melt.

My mother, now 95 years old, still has the first 1938 Jefferson nickel she got back in 1938 when she was a teenager. She kept it because it was a new type of nickel.

I'm sure this type of thing has happened for years and years.

I've read stories about thousands of old uncirculated coins discovered at a time in people's walls. I've also read stories about old shipwrecks yielding chests full of uncirculated 19th-century coins.

I hear you about collectors not being as rabid about saving coins as we are today, because people couldn't afford the luxury of saving coins. But I believe they did--not just in the same numbers. It's human nature to want to take something bright and shiny and keep it for yourself. Collectors--from your Alexander P. Bumsteads to your John Q. Rockefellers--have always been around. Eventually their holdings see the light of day. And just think of all the wonderful coins like these that are still unknown!

The harder question to answer is how to gem to superb gem 19th century examples survive and enough so that a number of collectors can still find them? I believe that once minted they went into bags. Just the jostling around of plopping out of the minting machine and then going into a bag would likely start adding marks to at least take the vast majority of these coins out of the superb gem arena. Although, I'm sure a lucky few make it and only a tiny portion of those are handled with gentle enough care to make it in our hands today. One could surmise that collectors made their way to the Mints and specifically asked for special care of newly minted specimens and that's how some survive in the great shape we see them today.

One particular series and denomination comes to mind - Capped Bust Halves. As many of you know, In addition to the healthy mintages they were shipped from bank to bank and not released into circulation until needed. Capped Bust quarters of the same date and condition are more expensive than CB halves today, because they were more the workhorse of local commerce, and so did not survive as much in high grades..