A standout in Stack’s Bowers Galleries’ Aug. 25 auction of the Georgia Gold Rush Collection was an 1861-D Coronet gold $5 half eagle graded MS-63 by Professional Coin Grading Service and housed in a recent “Retro” PCGS green label holder, which sold for $336,000.

Only 1,597 1861-D Coronet half eagles  were struck in the final year of production at the facility in Georgia. The coin in the auction has an impressive pedigree that includes stints in the collections of Egypt’s King Farouk, Ambassador and Mrs. R. Henry Norweb, Harry W. Bass Jr., and the Green Pond Collection.

It is one of just four in this grade at PCGS with none finer.

The Stack’s Bowers cataloger writes, “The strike is better than average although diagnostic softness is evident on the hair curls over Liberty’s brow, the eagle’s left talon and the uppermost arrow feather. For identification there is a tiny diagonal nick on the bridge of Liberty’s nose and trivial marks on the obverse between stars 5 and 6, on the reverse in the field below the arrowheads.”

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