1859 Indian Cent With A Funny Shield

One more thing - I purposely didn't put the grade on this one. It's in an Old Green Holder so I'm curious if you all think it might upgrade. Any guesses as to the grade?

I think I see a bit of wear on the feather tips for an AU58

1. The coin is slabbed PCGS as MS-63 in an old green holder. I agree with the grade, but there is always the lure (hype) that it could upgrade because it's in the old holder.

2. Cost? Value? Sure, they only made 20 of them, but there is also very little market for them. Scroll up and you'll see many serious coin collectors unaware they made these coins. Cost, well, I don't want to give a dollar amount. However, right now, there is a pretty sweet 1858 Indian Head cent pattern (that's right, 1858 Indian head, not a flying eagle!) on ebay in AU-50 (ANACS) for $950, although they are accepting 'best offers'. Is that a lot of money for the coin? I think that's a really good deal in my book. The bottom line is that this coin did cost a pretty penny, but I feel I got a good deal and it's definitely worth more to me than I paid.

It is a very interesting variation that I didn't know existed. Thanks for schooling me.

There were several different ways. Visitors to the mint in the mid 1800's could purchase surplus patterns from the mint. If you knew about a specific pattern you could write the mint and request to purchase one. Local dealer William Idler had good contacts with mint officials which allowed a lot of pattern and other rarities to be channeled from the Mint into the market. And then there were the two gold fifty dollar patterns of 1877 that William Woodin bought for $10,000. These had peen purchased from the mint via the usual manner back in the late 1870's, but when Woodin purchase them on the open market it cause an indignant reaction that someone was making so much money off of something that used to be government property that their return was demanded (Kind of sounds like the upset some people have over the secondary market sale of the hockey pucks) Well Woodin had paid $10,000 for them and he wasn't just going to give them back. So the Mint made a deal. In exchange for the two half union patterns Woodin was given two trunks full of pattern coins. These became the source material for the Adams-Woodin book on pattern coins (standard reference before the Judd book)and the source of many of the pattern seen on the market today.

The 1858 and 1859 pattern cents though also had a special source. There were soo many requests for examples of the pattern coins of the Indian Head cent that the mint made up and sold sets of all the 1858 and 1859 pattern cents. This is why they are some of the most common patterns.

Your penny just blew my mind!