10C 1797 PCGS MS66 16 STARS POGUE

The Finest Known 1797 16 Stars Dime

Parmelee – Milton A. Holmes – James A. Stack – Knoxville Collection

1797 Draped Bust Dime. 1797 16 Stars. John Reich-1. Mint State-66 (PCGS).

“The only one I have seen which I like better than the current coin was the James A. Stack coin.” — Ed Price

Marvelous pale blue, periwinkle, and deep silver gray tones blend across the obverse, while the reverse is a more subtle mélange of deep gray, violet, and blue. Cartwheel luster spins freely around both sides. A coin of great beauty and superlative preservation, free of defect or deficit, nice in every way a coin can be nice, from strike to luster to general aesthetic appeal. Beyond these considerations, and beyond the general rarity of any 1797 dime in a grade better than well worn, the die state is eye-catching, with a remarkably bold crack across the lower obverse. Starting at the rim and a point of star 2, it continues through star 1, the lowest curl, the tops of the date digits, the bust truncation, and across to the rim below star 13. At least two separate clashes are visible on both sides.

Coins as nice as the ones found in the D. Brent Pogue Collection require decades, even a century or more, of market context. Many of the coins herein are the finest known, which is a different concept than finest certified, or finest sold within the last decade, or even finest sold within memory. Short of a time machine, the only way to capture that long term perspective is to find comparisons of one coin to another in ancient auction catalogs, just the sort of comparisons that we leave in this sale for future students and collectors. The last important 1797 16 Star dime to sell was the Ed Price specimen, an NGC MS-62 sold in July 2008. Ed was the greatest modern student of early dimes and quarter eagles, a savvy technical numismatist who also had a superb eye for quality. Ed selected his coin, previously sold in Auction ’80 and the 1969 R.L. Miles sale, instead of the John Jay Pittman coin, among others. The Pittman coin has been graded MS-65 by PCGS, but Ed preferred his because of “a very distracting irregularity near the chin” of the Pittman coin and passed when it was offered in 1997. Ed studied famous dime collections assiduously, and found important dimes even in sales where they didn’t belong. In all his years of study, Ed determined that “The only one I have seen which I like better than the current coin was the James A. Stack coin, a very Choice Uncirculated coin.” Ed’s preferred dime was the dime we offer here.

Lester Merkin’s April 1966 sale included a superb group of early dimes, cataloged by Walter Breen. Called “the finest existing collection of United States dimes,” Merkin assessed it as comparable to the five best collections ever offered at auction: Parmelee (1890), F.C.C. Boyd (1945), Atwater (1946), W.W. Neil (1947), and Elliot Landau (1958), “the last-named being the smallest but the only one of the group which could have come near matching the present offering for sheer excellence of grade.” Looking at the 1797 16 Stars dime in that 1966 Merkin sale, the one that for years the Ed Price coin had been compared to, we find a coin described as “one of the two finest known of the type, very slightly exceeded by the Parmelee coin.” We have come full circle: almost a half century ago, the 1966 Merkin cataloger found only one example he liked better, namely the dime we offer here, the Parmelee coin.

Through all of the great collections of dimes, all the savvy collectors, and all the attempts to find the finest available example of this dime, there becomes one evident truth: this one is the best, and nothing else comes close. Even as PCGS CoinFacts estimates 20 or more Mint State pieces (our research finds the truth is probably closer to half that number), the majority are far below the Pogue specimen. We also suspect that the two entries under MS-66 both represent this coin, as examination of untold dozens, maybe hundreds, of sources reveals no other comparable piece. As noted, we feel quite comfortable in our conclusion that this piece is the single finest 1797 16 Star dime extant.

PCGS# 38747. NGC ID: 236C.

PCGS Population: 2, none finer. (16 Stars, JR-1)

Provenance: New York Coin and Stamp Company’s sale of the Lorin G. Parmelee Collection, June 1890, lot 744; Stack’s sale of the Milton A. Holmes Collection, October 1960, lot 2675; Stack’s sale of the James A. Stack Collection, January 1990, lot 3; Jay Parrino; Knoxville Collection, plated in the undated (2002) Knoxville Collection fixed price list by Jay Parrino’s The Mint, LLC.

Est. $150,000-$250,000

We know this SUPERB GEM will elevate ANY collection it resides in.