An 1804 dollar coin will be sold next week and has already attracted a bid of over $1 million.
The coin is listed at Heritage Auctions as the star item in their US Coins Signature Auction that closes with live sales from January 14 to 17.
The 1804 $1 Class III coin is under offer for $1,050,000 ($1,281,000 with buyer’s premium).
This is the Adams-Carter Specimen, one of around 10 examples of one of the most famous ever US coins that is not in a museum collection.
The Chapman Brothers, important 19th-century American coin dealers, dubbed the coin “the King of United States Coins”.
It is not the most valuable by some margin. A 1933 Double-Eagle has sold for $18 million, but the origin story of the 1804-dated coin is compelling.
No silver dollars were struck in 1804 with 1804 dates. Nineteen thousand were minted, but with an 1803 date.
Said Bin Sultan, the ruler of Muscat who received one of the legendary 1804 dollars.
Scroll forward to the 1830s, and an outward looking US is trying to strike up international trading relationships.
Envoy Edmund Roberts travels East with gifts for Asian rulers that include proof sets of US coins. In those sets are newly struck coins including dollars back-dated to the last known issue, in 1804.
Two of the sets were delivered to Muscat (now Oman) and Siam (Thailand) before Roberts succumbed to a fatal bout of dysentery.
The other two were returned to the US.
Another four coins were struck at around the same time.
The Siam coin was sold for $8.5 million in 2005; the Muscat example realised $7.7 million in 2021.
The rarity of these coins was known from their birth, and the earliest coin-collectors in the US made them an early focus of their passion.
As a result, in the 1850s, the US mint struck small numbers (maybe just more than 12) of extras to sell to collectors.
These restrikes make up the rest of the still tiny population of 1804-dated dollars, some without the lettered edge the real originals should have.
This example, the Adams-Carter specimen, was first sold by John W Haseltine, a dealer who was a close friend of Mint employee Oliver Bosbyshell. Haseltine, claiming to have bought the coin from an English owner (when it almost certainly came straight from the Mint), sold it to Phineas Adams in the 1870s.
In 2009 the coin was sold for $2.3 million at auction, its most recent public sale, and that makes it the sixth most valuable 1804 dollar sold at auction.
It is already well on the way to that mark before its sale next week, and is guaranteed to remain in the rarefied $1-million plus club.
