Last night, I found a U.S Braided Hair large 1 cent coin from 1846. This coin was among some of the first coins struck for circulation in the United States. The “Braided Hair” coin was issued between 1839 and 1857 and minted from the Philadelphia Mint. The designer was Christian Gobrecht. I’m assuming it being buried in the mud of the river kept it in the condition you see in the video with some slight degradation on the backside. My son Owen helped clean it for me and it was he who discovered the date of 1846 on it! I didn’t even realize that until he showed me.
Saltwater Sean
From 1816 to 1857, the United States Mint issued Coronet large cents at the Philadelphia Mint.
The Coronet large cent comes in two similar designs: Matron Head and Braided Hair, with the latter having a slightly different profile. This was the mint’s final large cent, which was replaced by the smaller diameter Flying Eagle cent in 1857.
Copper prices skyrocketed in the late 1840s, raising the cost of producing large cents. The US Mint began looking for an alternative that used less copper. The first attempt was to perforate the coin, which produced the ring cents of 1850 and 1851. The standard composition of these coins was billon, a 90% copper, 10% silver alloy. This coin was not produced because it was expensive to extract the silver from the alloy and the coins were difficult to remove from the dies. Furthermore, a drop in the price of copper reduced the need to replace the large cent.
The new cents, known as Matron Head cents, were not much better, with numismatist Walter H. Breen describing the design as “a spectacularly ugly head of Ms. Liberty”. In 1836, Christian Gobrecht made several changes to the design, giving Liberty a more youthful appearance.
Gobrecht made additional changes in 1839, introducing the “Petite Head” Braided Hair cent. In 1843, the bust was enlarged and tilted upward, resulting in the “Mature Head” design.
There were no large cents struck after 1857. They and the half cents simply became too expensive to manufacture any longer.
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