Barber Halves 1892 Through 1915

Boiled Dove,

Please post a couple photos of your doubled die Franklins just to make sure they are doubled dies and not MD.
John1

Thanks everyone. I'm just getting into this, but I really dig it. Learning so much, so fast. Thanks for all your help.

Wow, never saw one of those!

I dug up a David Lange article in the spring 2022 BCCS journal. All he says about the Morgan name is "What we now call Barber dimes were known variously as Liberty Head or Morgan Dimes during the 1930s-40s."

The earliest coin boards were called Morgan Type Dime Collection and Morgan Type Quarter Collection, with no mention of Liberty Head in the title until later editions. So dime, quarter and half were all known as "Morgan types." In tiny print on the dime board it says "C.T. Morgan designed the silver dollar of this type in 1878. This 80s [? illegible] type dime conforms to the 1878 dollar as to type". This seems to agree with what @jpsned says - apparently the Liberty head on the dollar, half, quarter and dime were somehow thought of as the same "type", and assigned them all to Morgan. At the bottom of the dime board, it also says " Charles E. Barber designed this dime", so clearly they were aware that it wasn't Morgan who designed them. Kind of a big snub to Barber! Oddly the nickels were still called Liberty Head nickels, without mentioning Morgan or Barber.

Apologies for deflecting the topic.

Here is the information page from my 1940 Barber dime folder. It bears out what kbbpll said above about the Barber/Morgan "similarities."

So by 1940 they were transitioning to calling them Barbers. Cool info. I think the early Liberty Head nickel boards/folders also had a "rare" plug for 1913.

Sometimes I've wondered why people thought the Morgan dollar Liberty head and the Barber Liberty looked similar. For one thing, the Morgan head faces left and the Barber head faces right.

I think the reason is because prior to these designs, the dollar and half dollar coins both featured the identical seated liberty design by Christian Gobrecht. The idea of a large head now representing Lady Liberty was so new to this generation (who hadn't experienced the flowing hair and bust dollars of the late 18th/early 19th centuries) that they felt similar, even though they weren't similar in details. People just saw them as two big heads, and thus felt they were alike in that regard.

I still have the old Whitman folders I had used before I moved to Dansco albums. I am often tempted to start filling them up again just to see how far I would get.