1814 Large Date

The 1814 Large Date Capped Bust dime is the first United States ten-cent piece produced after a two-year gap in dime coinage, the Mint having struck no dimes at all in 1812 or 1813 while the War of 1812 disrupted normal operations. When production resumed in 1814, the Philadelphia Mint delivered 421,500 pieces across two principal date-size varieties: a Large Date with notably taller numeral punches in the year, and a Small Date using shorter digits. A reverse-die break also produced a third recognized issue, the STATESOF variety, on which the words "STATES" and "OF" join through a metal flaw across the legend. The John Reich Collectors Society, which catalogues every die marriage (the specific pairing of one obverse die with one reverse die) in the Capped Bust dime series, attributes the Large Date as JR-1, a single marriage that accounts for the entire Large Date population. Reich himself, an engraver at the Mint, had introduced the Capped Bust design five years earlier, and the 1814 issue represents the first significant production run after the wartime interruption.

Authentication begins with the standard specifications: 18.8 millimeters in diameter, 2.7 grams in weight, and .8924 fine silver with a reeded edge. Cast counterfeits typically fail the weight test by tenths of a gram and reveal grainy or pitted surfaces under ten-power magnification, while genuine struck pieces show clean fields and crisp denticles around the rim. The variety attribution itself depends on accurate measurement of the date digits, since Large Date numerals stand roughly twenty to twenty-five percent taller than Small Date numerals, and the difference is decisive once a collector has compared the two side by side. Third-party grading service holders from PCGS (Professional Coin Grading Service) and NGC (Numismatic Guaranty Company) attribute the variety on the label, which removes the measurement question for most buyers. The single die marriage produces a consistent diagnostic look across surviving pieces, useful when checking a raw coin against published reference images.

Survival across all 1814 varieties combined sits in the low thousands, with Mint State (MS, the uncirculated grade range run by TPGs, the third-party grading services) examples genuinely scarce and circulated pieces available with patience. The Large Date is the more commonly seen of the two date sizes, but it carries a meaningful premium over generic Capped Bust dime type coins because 1814 is one of the most-collected dates in the series, supporting both date collectors and variety specialists at the same time. The combination of the post-gap historical significance, the single-marriage JR-1 attribution, and the multiple distinct varieties on a single date makes 1814 a fixture of advanced Capped Bust dime sets. For a fuller account of John Reich's design, the 1809 to 1837 production arc, and the role of die-variety collecting within the series, see the Capped Bust Dime series history.