The War of 1812 was disastrous for the American economy. Following an ill-conceived embargo that punished Americans more than their enemies, incursions over the American border in 1813, and an invasion of the American capital in 1814, specie was hoarded and the economy ground to a halt. The Mint was all but shuttered for most of 1815, with the war preventing the importation of cent planchets from England and the economic issues manifesting in very few deposits of specie.

“The high price of gold and silver bullion for some time past in the current paper money of the country has prevented, and, as long as this shall continue to be the case, must necessarily prevent, deposits of these metals being made for coinage to any considerable amount,” wrote Mint Director Robert Patterson in his Mint Report for the year. A deposit of silver from New Orleans led to a sizable number of quarter dollars being struck in 1815, but the key date 1815 half dollars were actually struck after the calendar turned to 1816. Only tiny deposits of gold came into the Mint, two of which arrived in 1815 and one of which remained leftover from late 1814, so it took but one day to produce the entire year’s production of half eagles. “The entire mintage of 635 coins was struck, probably in less than an hour, on November 3, 1815,” wrote Bill Eckberg in a 2015 article on the year’s coinage, published in Coin World. Researcher R.W. Julian calculated the number of 1815 half eagles given to each depositor: “Thomas Parker received 67 of the coins, Charles F. Kalkman another 210 pieces and the Bank of Pennsylvania was sent the rest, 358 pieces.” These 635 coins represented all the gold coins struck by the United States Mint in 1815, one of the smallest annual mintages of any denomination during the Mint’s long history.

While knowledge of American coins has evolved significantly over the last 150 years, the 1815 half eagle is one of only a few issues that have ever been seriously considered the rarest American coin. In April 1883, when S. Hudson and Henry Chapman offered an example of this issue to T. Harrison Garrett, they called it “the rarest coin of the U.S. regular series” and noted that “but four specimens of this date are known to exist, which cannot, we think, be said of any other date of U.S. coins.” They correctly added that the 1815 half eagle is “of greater rarity than the dollar of 1804” and surmised that “in a few years, when the collecting of gold develops, it will no doubt command a very large figure.” Their prescience is borne out by auction data compiled by P. Scott Rubin. The next authentic 1815 half eagle to sell at auction after 1883 was the example in the H.P. Smith sale of 1906, which sold for $1,050. The next year, the Stickney coin brought $2,000, and prices continued to increase thereafter. The example offered by the Chapmans to T. Harrison Garrett for $480 was undoubtedly the specimen offered (and described with the same verbiage) in their 1880 sale of the Samuel Bispham Collection. The coin was eventually acquired by T. Harrison Garrett from a W. Elliot Woodward sale later in 1883, then traded from Garrett to Harold P. Newlin when Newlin offered a finer specimen, before being purchased for the Mint Cabinet. It has been off the market ever since.

During this era, Harold P. Newlin and Lorin Parmelee also weighed in on the relative rarity and desirability of the 1815 half eagle. Newlin, best known today for his pioneering work on half dimes, was a careful student of early U.S. silver and gold coins. He was also T. Harrison Garrett’s closest advisor for some time. Newlin told Garrett in December 1884, “It is only very recently that the 1822 [half eagle] was known to be rare” and “Parmelee thinks [the 1822 $5] is the scarcest after 1815, but it will never bring as much as that date as the 1815 has always been considered the rarest coin in the U.S. series.” Newlin continued, commenting that it “has been advertised for and looked after for 25 years without another specimen being brought to light.” By the time the next example had changed hands via auction more than 20 years later, in the 1906 Harlan Page Smith sale, “probably about 6” specimens were reported to exist. Smith’s coin was probably the one offered in the 1890 Parmelee sale, consigned by Smith as a stand in for the inauthentic Parmelee coin, but retained by him after the auction.

Over the next several decades, a few new pieces were discovered. The Stickney coin came to light in 1907, though it was collected decades earlier; it appears to have been the seventh specimen identified. Even as new 1815 half eagles came to light, they disappeared from the market just as quickly. The Mint Cabinet acquired one in 1884, never to be sold again. The piece T. Harrison Garrett purchased the same year was not sold again for nearly a century. Stickney’s sold five times between 1907 and 1955 before it was snapped up by Josiah K. Lilly and eventually added to the National Numismatic Collection. The coin now impounded at the American Numismatic Association as part of the Harry W. Bass Foundation Collection, turned up in 1912, changed hands via only private transactions until it was sold in the 1954 King Farouk sale in Cairo, then sold just once more in the 1987 Norweb sale before Bass purchased it. The H.P. Smith coin traveled a similar route: acquired by John H. Clapp, sold privately to Louis Eliasberg, and never offered at a single auction between 1906 and the 1982 Eliasberg sale. It last sold in the 1999 Bass II sale. Similarly, the Flanagan coin sold in 1944, went into the James A. Stack Collection for a half century, and did not sell again until 1995.

The D. Brent Pogue example, once part of the Virgil Brand Collection, is almost certainly the example purchased by Brand from the Guttag Brothers in 1925. Brand owned two 1815 half eagles. One was acquired for $200 in 1899 from the relatively obscure German-born dealer M. David in a transaction that included the Eliasberg-Pogue 1822 half eagle. At the time, $200 was an inexpensive price for an 1815 half eagle. Research compiled by P. Scott Rubin shows that other examples had brought $300 in 1883 and $235 in 1890, both sold years earlier. On the other hand, Virgil Brand paid $3,500 for the 1815 half eagle he purchased in 1925, a record sum for the issue that was more than nice examples brought in 1922 (the Ten Eyck coin at $2,200) 1944 (the Flanagan coin at $2,800) and 1946 (the Atwater coin at $3,100). The coin in the 1944 JF Bell sale brought slightly more, $3,600, over 20 years after Brand’s purchase from the Guttags. It logically follows that the piece Brand paid a world record sum for is probably nicer than the coin for which he paid a market or below market price, meaning that the D. Brent Pogue coin is probably the one Brand acquired from the Guttags. A short list of famous rarities from the Virgil Brand Collection, written by Armin Brand in 1940, describes the 1815 half eagle acquired from the Guttag Brothers as “Unc.,” the sole grade descriptor Armin Brand made in the document and more evidence that the present specimen was the one Virgil Brand bought in 1925. The other piece Brand owned reappeared, after decades off the market, in the July 1993 Superior Galleries sale and last sold, graded NGC MS-62, in 2000.

Extensive research on this issue by Saul Teichman and the team of David Stone and Mark Van Winkle has found only ten known specimens. These experts, the grading services, and all other authorities agree: there is no finer specimen than this one. The provenance of each specimen has been rendered in detail by Stone and Van Winkle in The 1815 Half Eagle: New Discoveries, which has revealed that the specimen long thought to be in the Connecticut State Library is actually an altered 1813 half eagle and confirms that the example Joseph J. Mickley said was in the Swedish Mint cabinet really does exist. Purchased in 1851 “with 19 other gold coins from other countries,” the example in the Kungliga Myntkabinettet in Stockholm is illustrated and described in The 1815 Half Eagle, “graded AU-55 or better” though probably lightly cleaned. Aside from the Pogue example, the Harry Bass coin, and the two examples in the Smithsonian Institution previously mentioned, just six examples survive in private hands: the Pogue coin, the Garrett coin, the example last sold in the June 2000 Goldberg sale, the Clapp-Eliasberg coin last sold in the Bass II sale, the Atwater-Carter coin, and the Flanagan-James A. Stack coin. Just three examples have been certified by PCGS. The Clapp-Eliasberg-Bass specimen has been graded AU-58 by PCGS. PCGS has certified the Garrett coin as MS-64. The Pogue coin is the finest, certified MS-65 by PCGS.

The example to the left was sold by Stack's Bowers Galleries in the D. Brent Pogue Part III Auction, where it realized $822,500.