1835

The 1835 Capped Bust dime carries the highest single-year mintage of the entire Capped Bust series, with 1,410,000 pieces struck at Philadelphia. No other year in the run from 1809 to 1837 reached that figure, and the closest competitor, the 1836 at 1,190,000, falls more than 200,000 coins short. That production surge came near the end of the small-diameter reduced size that John Reich's portrait had worn since 1828, when steam-powered close collar coinage replaced the older open collar press work. For collectors building a Capped Bust dime set, the 1835 is the date that most often serves as the type representative, simply because more of them were made and more of them survived the heavy circulation that consumed earlier issues.

Authentication on an 1835 dime starts with the scale. A genuine piece weighs 2.7 grams on a planchet of 89.24 percent silver and 10.76 percent copper, struck within an 18.5 millimeter reeded collar. Cast counterfeits, which occasionally surface for early federal silver, betray themselves through a grainy or pebbled surface texture under magnification and through soft, rounded reeding on the edge where a real struck coin shows sharp vertical grooves. Die markers are the other line of defense. The 1835 was produced from multiple John Reich die marriages, cataloged by specialists using the JR numbering system that tracks each obverse-reverse pairing, and authentic examples align with one of those documented combinations. Encapsulation by a major third-party grading service, with its attribution and weight verification, removes most of the guesswork for buyers who are not yet comfortable reading die states themselves. Surfaces on circulated survivors typically show even gray toning; harsh cleaning, which leaves hairlines visible under angled light, is the most common problem in the marketplace.

Survival is relatively strong for a coin of this age, though strong is a relative word. Estimates place the population in the low thousands across all grades, the bulk of them in well-worn condition between Good and Fine. Examples in Extremely Fine and About Uncirculated turn up at major auctions on a predictable basis, and Mint State coins, while scarce, appear more often for 1835 than for any other late-series date. That combination of availability and historical weight is what makes the issue the standard choice for a type set slot representing the reduced-diameter Capped Bust design. For the broader context on the series, the design evolution from the large-diameter open-collar coins to this final small-diameter format, and the full year-by-year mintage record, see the Capped Bust Dime series history.