1858 Seated Half - Original Or Cleaned

IMHO this was washed with a rag around 1938 It does not look like it was harsh enough to completely have stripped away the sulfide and has regained some surfacing. Would I buy it? No. There are plenty of truly uncleaned examples out there.

At the sake of hijacking your thread, here is an untouched surface on the year for what you may want to look for

VF details, cleaned

I must disagree that this coin has been cleaned anytime recently. The surfaces are in line with a mid VF Lib Seated 50c that was pulled out of circulation before it got too crusty.

I would be surprised if this did not straight grade at a TPG.

Most Seated and Bust coins were cleaned years ago.

In this case, I think the coin had been lightly cleaned many, many years ago. But it would receive a straight grade at a TPG today.

It's silly to argue whether or not a 150+ year old coin has ever been cleaned. There is not an accepted numismatic consensus or hard law as to what is considered "cleaning", since anything from touching it with a coin cloth to blowing it off with compressed air in a can to running distilled water over it to putting it against a bench grinder wheel is removing originality from the coin, whether at an atomic, microscopic or self-evident level.

That being said, to me, the eye appeal is most important -- ranging from "just dipped it yesterday after scrubbing it with silver polish and shining it up on the grinding wheel" to "50 years after it was made, someone dusted it lightly with a soft goatskin or sheepskin chamois" and everything in between.

From a strictly logical point of view, there have to be Bust and Seated coins which were not cleaned -- those which were dropped and became ground burials shortly after minting (e.g. a pocket spill), tomb/grave coins traditionally placed into coffins for the afterlife, new coins which were placed into cornerstones of buildings, etc.

That being said, a large number of Classic US coins have been wiped or cleaned to some degree, from unnoticeably minimal to horrendously ugly extreme -- coin cleaning wasn't taboo well into the 1960s. Of course, attempting to define that quantity as a number or as a percentage is a fool's errand and an impossibility due to lack of data (your dataset is limited to the number of Classic US coins you can see, have seen or have in your possession, of course, and that dataset is a minuscule decimal percentage of the total number of coins minted from 1793-1964.)

Gem level ones may not have but essentially every circulated one has. What we call and refer to as original is things that appear original today. The mistake some people make is to then assume that means that it never ever was since day 1.

The simple fact is anything cleaned a 100 years ago will look fine assuming they didn't put a bunch of hairlines on it, but even though would have had enough time to wear off in circulation.

You also have to remember that it wasn't that long ago where the prevailing wisdom was to clean coins to make them look nicer whether it be with a wipe or a spit shine or harsher methods. The emphasis on originality overall isn't that old but old enough that minor cleanings would have had time to recover. Even look back to the 80ish where basically everything that moved was getting dipped.

My point is it's a mistake when people say things like this is what a coin that has never been cleaned looks like and then post something over a 100 years old. Plenty of the original coins today were cleaned at some point in their past and thankfully they were left alone long enough after that to recover.