Carson City went silent for four years before this coin existed. President Cleveland shuttered the mint in September 1885, and funding only returned after the 1889 election. Workers and machinery could not simply resume where they had left off, and no silver dollars were delivered until October of that year. The entire mintage was compressed into three final batches: 100,000 in October, 100,000 in November, and 150,000 in December.
The 350,000 figure alone does not explain the rarity. What does is what happened next: unlike its Carson City siblings from the early 1880s, the 1889-CC missed the Treasury vaults almost entirely. When the GSA sales of the 1970s released nearly 2.9 million uncirculated Carson City dollars to the public, the hoard contained exactly one 1889-CC. The Treasury had paid the rest out into circulation, much of it during the 1930s, so the date has to be found the hard way, one worn coin at a time.
The hasty restart of the mint shows on the coins themselves. Strikes are typically mediocre, though roughly a quarter of surviving examples show semi-prooflike or prooflike surfaces. In gem condition the date is nearly unobtainable: across the two major grading services, only about nine coins have been certified MS65, with a single MS67 and a single MS68, the famous Mills-Clapp-Eliasberg specimen.
This is the coin that separates a Carson City set from a completed Carson City set. Most collectors own the 1882 to 1884 dates within a year of starting; many chase the 1889-CC for a decade. Whatever grade you can afford, buy it certified. This date is counterfeited more than almost any coin in the American series, usually by adding a CC mintmark to its common Philadelphia sibling, of which more than 21 million were struck.
| Issue | Mint | Mintage |
|---|---|---|
| 1889 Morgan Dollar | Philadelphia | 21,726,000 |
| 1889-O Morgan Dollar | New Orleans | 11,875,000 |
| 1889-S Morgan Dollar | San Francisco | 700,000 |
| 1889-CC Morgan Dollar | Carson City | 350,000 |
Mintage figures: United States Mint, Annual Report of the Director of the Mint, cross-checked across independent published references. Specifications: United States Mint coin specifications.