The Mint's ledgers record 12,000 circulation-strike silver dollars for Philadelphia in 1895. Not one has ever been confirmed to exist. The prevailing theory is that they never left their bags before being melted under the Pittman Act of 1918, which destroyed over 270 million silver dollars without recording their dates. What remains is the proof issue: 880 coins struck for collectors, the entire known 1895 Philadelphia dollar mintage, and the reason this coin is called the King of the Morgans.
The arithmetic has a hard consequence for buyers: a circulated 1895 dollar with no mintmark is an altered coin until proven otherwise. Nearly all such pieces began life as an 1895-O or 1895-S before the mintmark was removed. Genuine impaired proofs, coins from the 880 that somehow entered commerce, do exist, but they are rare and they, too, belong in a grading service holder.
Because the entire issue was sold to collectors, survival is high relative to the tiny mintage, and the coin appears at major auctions with some regularity. It is the anchor of every complete Morgan collection and the reason most collectors define their set as everything but the 1895.
The King. Every series has a coin that defines its ceiling, and for the Morgan dollar this is it: a date that exists only as a proof, only in the hundreds, and only because collectors of 1895 paid a premium for polished examples of a coin nobody else wanted. The 12,000 ghosts in the ledger are the best story in American numismatics.
| Issue | Mint | Mintage |
|---|---|---|
| 1895 Morgan Dollar | Philadelphia | 880 |
| 1895-O Morgan Dollar | New Orleans | 450,000 |
| 1895-S Morgan Dollar | San Francisco | 400,000 |
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.