1893-CC

The 1893-CC $10 Liberty Eagle closes the book on Carson City gold coinage. By direction of the Treasury Secretary, coining operations at the Carson City Mint were suspended on June 1, 1893, and the facility never struck another coin, it continued as an assay office until 1933, but the eagle press fell silent that spring. The 14,000-piece mintage that emerged before the shutdown stands as the lowest-output CC eagle of the entire 1890-1893 reopening period and the final entry in a 24-year Carson City eagle series that began in 1870. Among the seventeen distinct CC eagle dates, the 1893-CC is the historical bookend, and that finality drives demand independent of pure rarity arithmetic.

Surviving population estimates run in the low hundreds, with the strong majority of accounted-for coins clustered in VF and XF grades. Mint State examples are genuinely scarce: combined PCGS and NGC reporting shows neither service has certified a piece higher than MS-62, and the MS-62 stratum itself is thin. The PCGS auction record sits at $84,000 for an MS-62 example sold by Stack's Bowers on April 13, 2022, a useful benchmark for the date's ceiling. Authentication should proceed deliberately given the stakes. Verify the weight at 16.718 grams (tolerance 16.65-16.79g) and a 27mm diameter; specific gravity should read approximately 17.2, with any meaningful divergence pointing to a copper-core or tungsten counterfeit. Examine the CC mintmark on the reverse below the eagle for proper punch geometry and clean seating in the field, added-mintmark deceptions worked from Philadelphia 1893 hosts (mintage 1.84 million) are the dominant counterfeit threat, and the join line around an applied mintmark betrays the work under magnification.

For collectors, the 1893-CC is the most aggressively pursued date in the Carson City eagle series after the 1870-CC inaugural issue, and the two compete for premium attention at every level. AU coins regularly bring five-figure prices when properly graded, and any Mint State example commands a substantial multiple over comparable AU58 material. The date is essentially mandatory for any complete CC eagle set and remains the single most frequently requested Carson City eagle issue from collectors building short sets around the mint's closing year. For broader context on the type, see the Liberty Head Eagle series history.