The three-dollar piece was a gold coin produced by the United States Bureau of the Mint from 1854 to 1889. Authorized by the Act of February 21, 1853, the coin was designed by Mint Chief Engraver James B. Longacre. The obverse bears a representation of Lady Liberty wearing a headdress of a Native American princess and the reverse a wreath of corn, wheat, cotton, and tobacco. The coin was struck on a thinner planchet and using a distinctive design.
About Three-dollar piece in brief
The three-dollar piece was a gold coin produced by the United States Bureau of the Mint from 1854 to 1889. Authorized by the Act of February 21, 1853, the coin was designed by Mint Chief Engraver James B. Longacre. The obverse bears a representation of Lady Liberty wearing a headdress of a Native American princess and the reverse a wreath of corn, wheat, cotton, and tobacco. In 1851, Congress had authorized a silver three-cent piece so that postage stamps of that value could be purchased without using the widely disliked copper cents. The piece was last struck in 1889, and Congress ended the series the following year. Although many dates were struck in small numbers, the rarest was produced at the San Francisco Mint in 1870 ; only one is known with certainty to exist. It circulated somewhat on the West Coast, where gold and silver were used to the exclusion of paper money, but what little place it had in commerce in the East was lost in the economic disruption of the Civil War, and was never regained. In 1889, then-Mint Director James P. Kimball wrote that it is supposed to be a multiple of the three- cents, for the convenience of postal transactions. The actual reason for the USD 3-coin was the abundant supply of gold discovered in California and author Q.David Bowers notes that it was actually not the gold that was actually necessary for the coin to be struck. The coin was struck on a thinner planchet and using a distinctive design.
Although over 100,000 were struck in the first year,. the coin saw little use. According to numismatic historian Walter Breen, \”the main purpose of the new 3¢ piece would be to buy postage stamps without using the unpopular, heavy, and often filthy copper cents \'”. In 1832, New York Congressman Campbell P. White sought a means of returning American gold coins to circulation, as gold was overvalued with respect to silver by the government. Although Congress, in passing the Coinage Act of 1834, made adjustments to the ratio between gold andSilver, it did not authorize a USD 3 piece at that time. In the years following, this rate was seen as too high and an impediment to commerce, and accordingly, Congress on March 3, 1851 authorized both a three- cent stamp and a three cent silver coin. In 1888, Congress passed a bill that authorized a 3-dollar gold coin; according to Numismatic writer Don Taxay, provision for it had been inserted at the behest of gold interests. In his 2003 article on three- dollar notes, Walter Hagans dismisses the postal postal explanation for the three dollar coin from August 1858, writing that the coin is actually a gold 3-denomination from the 1858 letter from an 1858 Q. David Bowers note that there is no reason to believe that the 3- dollar coin was actually needed.
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This page is based on the article Three-dollar piece published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
