The Curious Case Of The 1865 Quarter Eagle (Or, A Collector's Dilemma)

PCGS - At the February 2023 Long Beach Expo, a client came up to the table and asked if I would look at a coin for him. The coin in question was a PCGS XF45 1865 Liberty Head Quarter Eagle. This seems like a fairly mundane coin if you don't know the series, but this is actually a rare issue with an original mintage of just 1,520 business strikes and a surviving population of less than 50.


The scarce 1865 Liberty Head Quarter Eagle requires great patience and lucky timing for collectors who want an example for their collections. The pictured example is graded PCGS AU58.

As he placed the coin in front of me, he asked a simple question. "Should I have bought this coin?" He informed me that he was assembling a complete set of regular-issue 1865-dated U.S. coinage, and this was a coin for which he had been searching in vain for over a decade.

I wasn't overly fond of the coin as it had a funky orange-gold color, which, in my opinion, limited the eye appeal. My first reaction was to tell him, "No, you should have passed."

Then I began to think when the last time was that I handled a decent 1865 Quarter Eagle, let alone a nice one. It seemed like a looooong time.

I went onto the PCGS website to search for recent sales. There were only seven sold at auction since 2016, but two were No Grades. There really weren't many I liked. In fact, the only one that I cared for that had crossed the block in recent memory was an example graded PCGS AU58 that fetched $45,600 at a 2020 Heritage Auctions sale. Cool piece — but way out of this collector's budget. I should note here as an aside that I sold the finest-known example of the 1865 Quarter Eagle, an amazing PCGS MS63, back in 2002 to the Kansas Collection.

I was intrigued enough to further my search for examples of this coin that had sold at auction and was compelled by what I found.

In just five minutes, I had changed my mind about this collector's purchase. While I wasn't crazy about the actual coin, it was entirely possible that if he had passed, he might have had to wait a decade or even longer to even have a shot at a nice XF/XF+. And that's if such a coin even existed!

This brings me to the point of this article. If you collect a very challenging series or a specific set, the chances are good that you will be forced to buy at least one coin — maybe a lot more — which you really don't like. And you'll probably have to pay too much for it, to add insult to injury. In the case of the 1865 Quarter Eagle, the collector made a difficult decision, but it was 100% the right one.

1865 Liberty Head Quarter Eagle