1875-S

San Francisco's 1875 double eagle output sat squarely in the middle of three consecutive million-plus Type 2 production years, bracketed by 1874-S at 1,214,000 coins and 1876-S at 1,597,000. That clustering is no accident. The Comstock silver boom was funneling western bullion through the Mint's Granite Lady on Fifth Street, and double eagles were the workhorse vehicle for shipping value across the Pacific to Asian trading partners and across the Atlantic to settle international balances. Most struck-for-export coins from this run never circulated domestically, which is why the 1875-S survives in respectable numbers despite the gold recall of 1933 vaporizing many of its Treasury-held siblings.

This is the date a type collector reaches for when they want a representative Type 2 With Motto reverse with "TWENTY D." spelled out below the eagle, a design Longacre's successors used only between 1866 and 1876. Douglas Winter's San Francisco Type 2 analysis ranks it the second most available SF Type 2 issue, plentiful through MS61 but moderately scarce in MS62, very scarce in properly graded MS63, and extremely rare beyond. Strikes tend to show the soft central detail and prooflike fields characteristic of the era's heavy production runs, where dies were pushed past their useful life rather than retired.

The 2013 Saddle Ridge Hoard repatriated fifteen examples of this date from a Northern California hillside cache, with the finest grading PCGS MS64 to tie for second finest known. The single PCGS MS67 finest-known specimen realized $432,000 at Stack's Bowers on March 25, 2020, a result that crystallizes the high-mintage low-MS-survival paradox defining the SF Type 2 era. Mid-grade buyers face a friendlier market than the headline numbers suggest, with examples surfacing regularly from European bank holdings repatriated since the 1990s. For broader design context across all four major sub-types, see the Liberty Head Double Eagle series history.