1907 Liberty

The 1907 Liberty issue closes a sixty-nine-year run, the final business-strike Coronet $10 ever produced and the last gold eagle struck under Christian Gobrecht's design before Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Indian Head replaced it later the same year. President Roosevelt's so-called "pet crime", his push to redesign every U.S. gold denomination, landed on the eagle in August 1907, with the new feather-headdress portrait approved on August 31 and full circulation strikes following in early November. Philadelphia's 1,203,899-piece delivery (occasionally cataloged as 1,203,973) therefore stands as the terminal date of a series that opened with Gobrecht's Coronet portrait in December 1838, making this the bookend coin for one of the longest unbroken design runs in U.S. coinage.

Despite the historical weight, the issue itself is one of the more available later-Liberty eagles. The seven-figure mintage and substantial European bank-bag repatriation through the late twentieth century left abundant Mint State material in the market, and PCGS shows healthy populations through MS63 with meaningful drop-off only above MS64. Doug Winter and other Liberty gold specialists treat the date as a default type representative rather than a condition rarity, with NGC Price Guide values around $1,600 in MS64 and $5,000–$6,000 in MS65. Authenticators check weight to the 16.718-gram standard, confirm the Coronet hub rather than an Indian Head die pairing, and inspect the reverse field for rim disturbances suggesting a recently surfaced or harshly cleaned coin, common-date eagles attract overgrading more often than outright counterfeiting.

Demand splits between type buyers acquiring a single Coronet $10 example and series collectors who want the literal last-year coin to anchor a date set. AU58s trade modestly over melt, MS62–MS63 examples sell in the $1,300–$1,800 retail band, and gem material commands strong premiums driven by closure-of-series narrative as much as condition. With the Indian Head Eagle launching weeks after this delivery wrapped, the 1907 Liberty captures the precise hinge moment in early-twentieth-century American coinage, the end of Gobrecht's portrait and the opening of the Saint-Gaudens era. For broader context on Coronet design evolution, mint distribution, and the 1907 transition, see the Liberty Head Eagle series history.