1916 25C MS64 PCGS....

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1916 Standing Liberty Quarter, MS64

1916 25C MS64 PCGS. A fateful meeting between Mint personnel in November 1916 was responsible both for the scarcity of the 1916-D dime and the 1916 Standing Liberty quarter. Three denominations--the dime, quarter, and half dollar--were undergoing design changes in that same year. Earlier in the year, Philadelphia and San Francisco had issued dimes of the Barber design. Once the Mercury dime design was finalized, all three mints produced examples of those coins as well. The entire issue of 264,000 1916-D Mercurys was released in November, after which Mint Director F.J.H. Von Engelken held a meeting Nov. 24 in Washington with superintendents Adam Joyce of Philadelphia, T.W.H. Shanahan of San Francisco, and Thomas Annear of Denver. Dime coinage was halted to meet a sudden demand for quarter dollars--of the Barber design, as the Standing Liberty quarter was still seeing various tweaks. Roger Burdette, in Renaissance of American Coinage 1916-1921, takes up the story:

"There was no time to produce quarters at Denver or San Francisco as originally planned, so a token number--52,000 according to the mint report--were coined in Philadelphia sometime on December 16, 1916. These coins had no commercial importance but were produced to ensure that the twenty-five-year design replacement 'requirement' was technically met. They also established production of the three-coin series in 1916, as planned."

From that "token number" of 52,000 quarters, most slipped unnoticed into circulation. Perhaps 3%-4% of the original mintage survives today, with the average certified coin grading around Choice VF-XF or thereabouts. Mint State examples comprise about half of those coins, with most of them in the MS63-MS64 range and a considerable number certified as Full Head. This is a largely untoned coin that exudes the swirling mint luster usually seen on high grade examples of this date. There are no mentionable abrasions on either side, placing this piece in the upper end of the few MS64 pieces known. (Registry values: N4719)

Coin Index Numbers: (NGC ID# 242Y, PCGS# 5704, GSID# 5533)

Metal: 90% Silver, 10% Copper
Weight: 6.25 grams
ASW: 0.18085oz
Mintage: 52,000

View Certification Details from PCGS