A ‘Legendary’ 132-Year-Old Dime Recently Sold for More Than $1.2 Million at Auction. What Makes It So Extraordinary?

The coin is an 1894-S Barber dime, “one of the classic rarities in all of numismatics,” according to Stack’s Bowers Galleries, which conducted the September 1 sale. Ranked fourth in the popular 100 Greatest U.S. Coins reference guide, the dime is named after Charles E.

Barber, who designed it while serving as the sixth chief engraver of the United States Mint from 1879 to 1917. Today’s U.S. dime features a portrait of Franklin D. However, 1894-S Barber dimes depict Lady Liberty on one side and a wreath with the words “One Dime” on the other.

A small “s” sits below the wreath. Only 24 of the 1894-S Barber dimes were minted in San Francisco in June 1894, and three were reserved for assay—testing to ensure they met legal and manufacturing standards—leaving a net mintage of just 21 coins. Only a year earlier, the San Francisco Mint had produced 2,491,401 dimes.

It expected demand to remain strong in 1894, but by then the nation was in the midst of a deep recession known as the Panic of 1893. As the economy contracted, demand for newly minted coins plummeted—and the San Francisco Mint ultimately stopped producing dimes for nearly half the year, according to Stack’s Bowers Galleries. Today, experts know of only nine examples of the 1894-S Barber dime, and most are typically held by private collectors for decades—meaning opportunities to purchase them are few and far between.

Before the Stack’s Bowers offering, just five 1894-S Barber dimes had come up for purchase since 2005, selling for $1.3 million to $2.16 million, according to the auction house. The newly sold 1894-S Barber dime holds special significance for Q. David Bowers, who co-founded the firm that would eventually become Stack’s Bowers Galleries.

In November 1957, at age 19, he purchased the dime for $4,750—which, at the time, was a “seemingly ridiculous price,” Bowers wrote for Coin World in 2016. The dime made him famous, helping launch the “greatest career American numismatics has ever seen,” according to a statement from the auction house. Bowers and his business partner, Jim Ruddy, then sold the dime for $6,000 to Emery Mae Norweb, whose family held on to the coin until October 1987, when Stack’s Bowers auctioned it for $77,000.