Franklin Mint History Of The US 1980 Error

Very interesting.

From the way the letter is written, it looks like all of them were struck incorrectly, therefore it would not have been rare. However, it depends on how many were returned for exchange and what they did with the returns. It could be that the actual survival rate for this error is much lower.

Thanks for posting this interesting story!

It's funny how the letter says "They Discovered" the error. I don't think these are junk metal (actually, no metal is junk and can be sold to recyclers for cash).

I think, at best, this is worth holding onto and passing down for posterity.

Yes, it would be interesting to know more of its family history.

For what it is worth, I have a couple Franklin Mint sets that I have inherited. They may not worth a lot, but to me they are priceless for sentimental reasons.

@jbuck




Always a good reason

Thanks for posting this update and

We hope you stick around!

I thought I'd offer a bit of background information that might be of some interest.

The Franklin Mint issued a set of 200 medals under the name "History of the United States" between 1966 and 1977. The series included one medal for each year from 1776 to 1975 with each depicting a key historical event from the given year. The medals were issued in sterling silver (0.925 fine) and in bronze. As noted above, it is very common to find these sets (or partial sets) listed on ebay; the bronze sets typically appear more often than the silver sets.

The set you have was not part of the original 200-medal series. It was a follow-up / extension set that was issued years later and was not nearly as popular with collectors as the original set - medal collecting, in general, entered a "cooling period" after the flurry of releases leading up to and during the US bicentennial era.

As others have noted, it is difficult to estimate the true rarity of the Reagan error medal. I would suggest that the majority of owners of the set kept the medal with the error vs. sending it back for replacement. Even casual collectors assume that there will be future value in an error piece.

Unfortunately, the collecting of Franklin Mint sets is not a "hot" area these days. There are some great FM sets out there that consistently draw enough collector attention to merit a numismatic premium, but the vast majority of silver sets are hard to sell at prices above bullion value; dealers typically offer well below bullion value for these sets. Bronze sets often require price points in the $1 to $2 per medal range to sell.

I don't have access to mintage figures for your set, but I would estimate that fewer than 10,000 sets were sold. While every set originally included the Reagan error, I believe it is fair to assume that only a portion of the original sets were updated with the corrected medal. I would therefore suggest that the error medal for Reagan is actually the more common of the two and that it would not command much of a premium in the marketplace among knowledgeable buyers (I can't make the same assumption for the uninformed, however, as they often pay crazy amounts for things!).

Hope this was somewhat helpful!