The Mint has never purposefully struck 11-cent coins or $1.25 pieces, but they exist nonetheless and are avidly collected.

On rare occasions, perhaps by accident, perhaps on purpose, dies are mismatched when they’re placed in coinage presses — an obverse die for one denomination is paired with the reverse die of a different denomination.

For this to happen the coins must be similar in size, limiting the possibilities to 11-cent coins — coins from paired dime and cent dies — and $1.25 coins — coins from paired quarter dollar and dollar dies.

The errors, called mules by collectors, are extraordinary scarce and sell for $50,000 and up.

In 2010, Heritage Auctions sold a pair of cent-dime mules — a 1993-D cent obverse paired with a dime reverse on a cent planchet and a 1995 cent obverse with a dime reverse on a dime planchet.

Heritage’s listing for the 1995 coin notes, “An astounding mint error that prior to the 1990s was believed impossible to occur. Only the narrow difference in die diameter between the cent and dime makes it plausible that a busy mint worker could erroneously pair dies of different denominations. Most likely, a press run was made from this die pairing and detected by an inspector, possibly the operator of the mint press. Perhaps the entire batch was melted, aside from the present coin.”

In 2000 the collecting world was startled to learn that the Mint had produced mules that married the obverse of a State quarter dollar with the Soaring Eagle reverse of the just-released golden Sacagawea dollar. Each side of this mule carries the denomination — QUARTER DOLLAR on the obverse and ONE DOLLAR on the reverse — making the coin a $1.25 piece.

The error was first reported to the numismatic community in May 2000 by Frank Wallis from Mountain View, Arkansas, who found an example in a 25-coin roll of Uncirculated Sacagawea dollars from First National Bank & Trust.

While collectors across the country checked their change for the coins, only 15 have been found to date. New Mexico collector Tommy Bolack has gobbled up most of the coins as they came on the market, currently owning 11 of the 15 pieces. He has paid as much as $117,500 for a coin in 2014. (Bolack was an under-bidder on the same coin when it went on the auction block in 2012. Bolack dropped out at $100,000 as the piece soared to $155,250.)

The various $1.25 pieces are believed to have been struck from three different pairs of dies. Coin World has reported, “The presence of more than a single die pair would suggest that production of the errors was prolonged and the initial mintages sizeable.”

It’s interesting to speculate if any more or out there, lying in unsearched rolls or bags of the millennium dollars.

Gold dust and nuggets were everywhere in California during the early years of the Gold Rush, but coins were scarce. Into the void stepped numerous private mints and the United States Assay Office. The provisional government Mint struck $10 eagles and $20 double eagles but is most known for its massive $50 gold pieces, each one weighing about 2 ½ ounces. 

The coins circulated widely and were especially beloved by bankers because in an area where paper money was not welcome, the hockey pucks made it easier to keep accounts. 

When the San Francisco Mint opened in 1854, local bankers petitioned the government to keep the denomination. Treasury Secretary James Guthrie recommended that Congress authorize the coining of $100 gold coins, to be called “unions”; $50 coins to be called “half unions” and $25 coins to be called “quarter unions.” 

The issue passed the Senate on June 16, 1854, but never surfaced in the House. 

The half union lay dormant for more than 25 years until 1877 when, out of the blue, Charles Barber cut dies for a pair of half-union patterns. A single gold pattern and a handful of copper pieces were struck from each die. 

The patterns featured a Coronet Head Liberty on the obverse and an eagle on the reverse. The two patterns, which have a checkered ownership history, were identical except for the size of Liberty on the obverse. 

Researcher Don Taxay theorized that Mint Director H.R. Linderman, a coin collector, ordered the coins produced for his own use. 

No unions, which would have weighed about 5 ounces, or quarter unions were produced and nothing came of the pattern $50 gold pieces. 

In 1915, the denomination enjoyed a brief respite when a few hundred commemorative $50 gold pieces were struck as part of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition celebration. Since 1986, United States 1-ounce gold bullion pieces have been nominally denominated as $50 pieces, but there was never a thought that these round pieces would actually circulate as coins, especially because the denomination minted into its design is about 1/25 of the piece’s value as metal. 

Next: Eleven cents and a buck and quarter

Stellas, or $4 gold pieces, were produced nearly three fourths of a century before Stanley and Stella took up residence in the French Quarter, and none were produced in New Orleans. 

In the 1870s, John A. Kasson had a history, a title to be reckoned with, and a plan. He had served six terms as a congressman representing southwest Iowa before deciding not to run again in 1876. Among other duties while serving in congress, he was chairman of the House Committee of Coinage, Weights, and Measures. After leaving Congress, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Austria-Hungary. 

What the world needs now, Kasson told his boss, Secretary of State William Maxwell Evarts, is an international gold coin, one that would flow easily from nation to nation. Convertibility was big in Europe, with the Austrian 8 florin, Dutch 8 florin, French 20 franc, Italian 20 lire and Spanish 20 peseta coins all being equal in value. 

The House coinage committee signed on, designating the new international coin a Stella. 

While the foreign coins were worth $3.88 U.S., the United States never tried to match the European coins exactly. Instead, it opted for a $4 coin, which proved not close enough for a cigar. 

The Stella showed Liberty on the obverse surrounded by 13 stars separating each letter of the legend 6G .3S .7C 7GRAMS, giving its metallic content as 6 grams of gold, 0.3 grams of silver and 0.7 grams of copper. A large star dominated the reverse center. 

Charles E. Barber and George T. Morgan both took a crack at Liberty on the obverse. Barber’s showed Liberty with flowing hair. Morgan’s had coiled hair. Both types were struck in 1879 and 1880, but most bore Barber’s flowing hair design and the date 1879. 

In 1879, the Mint made up 15 sets of three pattern coins – a silver dollar, a patented gold alloy dollar and a gold Flowing Hair Stella – for coinage committee review. Congressmen were invited purchase the coins at $6.50 a set. The sets proved so popular that the Mint struck about 400 more. Unsold sets were offered to connected collectors in subsequent years for $15 a set. 

A Guide Book of United States Coins (the Red Book) estimates mintages of 425 for the 1879 Flowing Hair coin, 10 for the 1879 Coiled Hair version, 15 for the 1880 Flowing Hair delicacy and 10 for the 1880 Coiled Hair coin. 

As patterns go, the 1879 Flowing Hair Stella is fairly common. Few people collect patterns, and mintages are frequently in the single digits. But because no other $4 coins were struck, and because the Stella has been listed in the Red Book since the beginning, it is collected (at least conceptually) as part of the regular-issue gold series. At auction the most common Stella usually trades north of $100,000. 

Coke was a nickel. It was in the 1890s, when the current Coca Cola Co. was incorporated. It was during World War I, the Great Depression and even World War II.

Coke was a nickel. It had always been a nickel and gigantic signs painted on the signs of drugstores and plastered on billboards everywhere declared that price – until they didn’t.

Rising raw materials prices forced the company to rethink its pricing in the late 1940s. But, there were nearly 400,000 obstacles to a price hike. Of the 460,000 vending machines in operation in the United States then, some 85 percent were owned by Coke and all of those were set to dispense a bottle of pop after one coin – a nickel – was deposited.

The machines could not accept more than one coin or give change.

Coke’s options were to double the price of its popular pop to a dime, overhaul the machines so they could either give change or accept more than one coin, or ask the Mint to create a new denomination especially for Coke – 7 ½ cent pieces.

In a 2004 “Journal of Money, Credit and Banking article, economists Daniel Levy and Andrew T. Young report, “Doubling the price of Coca-Cola from a nickel to a dime, i.e. 100% increase, was out of the question. However, a less than 100% increase in the price would require the public to use anywhere between two and five coins to buy a Coke, which could lead to a ‘logistic nightmare.’ [Coke President Robert W.] Woodruff considered this single-coin issue a matter of such significance that he began exploring the possibility of having the minting of a new 7.5¢ coin authorized by the U.S. Treasury Department. ... Woodruff submitted a request in 1953 to the newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower (his hunting companion and friend) to get the U.S. Department of Treasury to mint a new 7.5¢ coin. Eisenhower forwarded the request to the Treasury Department officials, who did not like the idea.”

By 1951, Coke stopped placing the 5-cent price on advertising and started raising prices at soda fountains around the county. The last nickel Coke is believed to have been sold in 1959.

By the 1960s, vending machines typically charged a dime.

Next: Stanley Kowalski’s coin

His out-of-left-field proposal appeared in that year’s Annual Report of the Director of the Mint.

“I beg to suggest the advisability of recommending to Congress the passage of an act authorizing the coinage of a copper and nickel 2½-cent piece. Inquiry, prompted by requests contained in letters from many parts of the country, discloses a real demand for it. When you consider that we have no coin between the 1-cent piece and the 5-cent piece and that many an article worth more than a cent and less than 5 cents sells for the latter price because of the lack of an intermediate monetary unit of value, the economic importance of it will be readily seen.

“Articles which now sell for 15 cents each or two for a quarter would sell for 12½ cents. Popular shops, such as the 5 and 10 cent stores, would undoubtedly place articles now selling two for 5 cents on sale at 2½ cents each; and it is not at all unlikely that street car companies would carry children of school age for 2½ cents.”

A few days after the report was released on Nov. 30, 1916, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette took up the cause in a front-page story on Dec. 10. The paper also opined the Mint should strike 2-cent and 3-cent pieces again.

“The need for new denominations is also indicated by the fact that in certain sections of the country merchants will give the customer a brass or pasteboard check in change which is good for ½ or 2 ½ cents. In New Orleans such practice is common and even though the law does not provide, the people have made coins themselves, which are called ‘quarties.’ In the New England states these personal coins have also been observed in circulation and even in Pittsburgh, where it is asserted that certain dispensers of ‘wet goods’ have long handed out a 2½ cent check when 15 cents was passed over the bar for a two-for-a-quarter drink.”

Woolley’s proposal apparently went nowhere. No patterns are known and the next Mint director Raymond T. Baker made no mention of the proposed denomination in his 1917 annual report.

Next: The Coke coin

?The United States has had its share of odd denominations that actually reached circulation, but there's an even odder assortment of coins that were proposed but never produced.

One was the bright idea of a government official; another the hare-brained scheme of a politician’s pal. Some were solutions in search of problems. A couple were the result of a screw-up or maybe a “purpose-up” on the Mint’s factory floor.

From the earliest days, America’s currency was a non-decimal mishmash. The Spanish Milled Dollar, the basis of much of the commerce in the colonies, used a base-8 number system. Eight-real pieces circulated as dollars, 4-real pieces as half dollars, 2-real pieces as quarter dollars, 1-real pieces or bits were worth 12 1/2 cents, and half-real pieces or picayunes, worth 6 1/4 cents.

The later coin, famously, was enough to buy a newspaper in New Orleans, the still-in-business Times-Picayune. In 1837, when the Picayune started business, United States coins were still scarce in much of the country, but old Spanish coins circulated everywhere.

In the East, the Spanish colonial coins circulated side by side with English-based currency, where a pound was worth 20 shillings and a shilling was worth 12 pence, except where it wasn't. From time to time various colonies decided upon different valuing schemes in an attempt to keep silver coins in local circulation.

Then, of course, there was Gouverneur Morris’s 1783 system of marks (1,000 units), quints (500 units), bits (10 units), and fives (5 units). Morris’ monetary system is known to collectors from a series of mostly unique patterns. The last time one went on the block, a silver quint, it sold for $1,175,000.

Given that history, it’s no wonder the Mint struggled with a multitude of real and suggested denominations.

Next: 2½ cents, of course

With a mintage of more than 300,000, the last regular issue silver dollar – the 1964-D Peace dollar – should be an easily accessible piece. However, none is known.

In the early 1960s as silver dollars were diverted into the numismatic market, gambling casinos became concerned about the sudden disappearance of what was, in effect, a government issued gambling chip and prevailed upon Congress to authorize replacement.

The last shipment of silver dollars – a reported 1 million pieces ordered by Heralds Club – occurred in 1964. The few silver dollars the casinos had on hand quickly walked out the door. One casino reported losing an astounding 45,000 coins a day before quitting the dollars.

On Aug. 3, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation authorizing minting of some 45 million silver dollars. In mid-May, the Denver Mint produced 300,000-plus trial strikes. However, Congress, acting wisely for once, called a halt, and the coins were ordered destroyed.

Not one is known to have survived the melt. Reports, though, periodically surface of survivors – including one that was supposedly given to Johnson.

The casinos quickly found an alternative – issuing their own metal chips. The Franklin Mint eventually dominated that market.

The story of the 1964-D Peace dollar has a postscript. In 2015 researchers including Q. David Bowers discovered among the Mint’s archived treasures the models, hubs and master dies for a 1964 Morgan dollar. No trial strikes are known to have been made from those dies. But wow, what a coin it would be.

In the early 1960s, as silver rose above $1.29 an ounce, the value at which a silver dollar is worth more as metal than money, collectors, dealers and bullion merchants formed long lines outside the Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., to buy $1,000 bags of silver dollars.

The payoff was guaranteed, and in some cases it was incredible.

Because few people wanted silver dollars when they were minted in the late 1800s and early 1900s the Mint stored them by the bag for decades, periodically inventorying them by weighing them.

Bag by bag the piles were depleted, as coins minted as long ago as the 1850s came out. Rare coins became common and none so dramatically as the 1903-O Morgan dollar.

It had been the star of the Morgan dollar series. Q. David Bowers estimates, in his Silver Dollars & Trade Dollars of the United States: A Complete Encyclopedia, that fewer than 10 uncirculated pieces were known before October 1962, when the Treasury Department released bags and bags of them.

Bowers estimates 200,000 or more Uncirculated 1903-O dollars exist today. Before the Treasury release, the coin cataloged for $1,500, more than any other Morgan. The price fell off a cliff in 1963, dropping to as low as a reported $7.

Dealers still tell stories 50 years on about lucky people who glommed onto a roll or a bag of the just released coins and sold them one at a time to unsuspecting dealers at their pre-flood prices.

Today the coin lists in Coin World’s Coin Values at $425 in MS-63. The value and the demand for the coin are in no small part based on its fabled history.

 Next: A dollar so rare it doesn’t exist

Contemporary newspapers report:

¦ In 1897, Chateau, Mont., bartender Billy Seymour received one in change.

¦ In 1912, a Defiance, Ohio, widow faced a comfortable old age because her late husband had bought one from a passing tramp years before.

¦ In 1914, a laborer excavating a site for the Yale hockey rink found one in a buried jar of coins.

Nothing more has been heard about these fantastic finds, but in 1913 famed dealer B. Max Mehl placed a well-worn 1804 dollar in the H.O. Granberg Collection sale.

Auction commentary reported the coin was found in Maine and was owned by a Pinkerton Detective Agency employee when Granberg bought it in 1906.

But there was a problem with the piece. It was unlike any 1804 dollar ever seen before. The 4 was too far to the right.  

But Mehl claimed the coin had passed the “heat test” with flying colors, proving “beyond a doubt” that it was not only a genuine 1804 dollar but that it was a genuine 1804 dollar struck in 1804.

Granberg, he said, had prevailed upon the Mint to test the coin. A 1906 report by Pinkerton operative Charles F. Dahlen was included in the auction description, where he is quoted as saying the Mint’s curator “took me to the Chief Engraver, who gave the dollar what he termed ‘a severe heat test,’ by heating the ‘4’ and endeavored to pick and knock it off, BUT IT REMAINED FAST.”

Heat test or no, critics abounded, and Mehl withdrew the coin from the sale.

That coin, actually an altered 1800 dollar, remained in the Granberg family for decades and was exhibited at the 2011 ANA Word’s Fair of Money.

Granberg also owned a genuine 1804 dollar, the Idler specimen, which was donated to the ANA museum in 1991 by Aubrey and Adeline Bebee.

Next: Rare coins by the bagful