Our 100 Greatest United States Modern Coins blog series continues with the sister act of a coin that we covered long ago. A $5 denomination then, we now take a closer look at Whitman Publishing’s compilation as it ranks the $10 denomination of the same exact strike. Authors Jeff Garrett and Scott Schechter will be leading us along as always.
#20 – 1999-W $10 American Gold Eagle, From Unpolished Proof Dies
Along with its $5 companion, the 1999-W $10 Gold Eagle is the first circulation strike coin that bears the ‘W’ mintmark from West Point. All the gold bullion coins in 1999 were struck at the facility in New York, but typically the Proof coin is the only one to bear the proof (no pun intended). The Proof coin is directly sold to customers while the bullion edition coins are only sold to authorized dealers. Bullion coins do not include mintmarks generally speaking while collector edition coins do.
Created in Philadelphia and then shipped to West Point, the dies for the 1999 Gold Eagle coins were a part of a major mix up. It is said that the dies were thought to have been intended for Proof coins and had not undergone the final steps before being shipped to West Point. It looked just like a bullion coin die, and so it was put into production where quarter ounce Gold Eagles were minted with the ‘W’ mintmark. Thus, the 1999-W, Struck from Unpolished Proof Dies variety was created.
Many questioned such a massive error as Proof dies are generally accounted for, and several manual steps are put into place before the striking of coins even begins. However, it is also said to have been the large number of gold bullion coins being struck in the year before the millennium that caused the mistake to occur. Y2K fears were real, causing over 560,000 $10 Gold Eagles to be struck instead of the usual 70,000-80,000. The production of over half a million Gold Eagles for one denomination is still unheard of today. Production facilities and demand were the root cause of several mistakes made that year.
Typically speaking, around 6,000 quarter ounce Gold Eagles are struck from each pair of dies. It is estimated that just one of the dies was used to strike the ‘W’ mintmark coin, estimating that 6,000 is also the mintage. Around 3,000 coins have been found of the $10 Gold Eagle coins, with many still believed to be in the hands of collectors either knowingly or unknowingly.
This coin has moved up five spots since its first edition ranking of #24.