2015-S Saratoga, NIFC

The 2015-S Saratoga, NIFC closed the fourth year of San Francisco business-strike ATB production, the fifth and final 2015 design sold direct to collectors. Barbara Fox's reverse depicts American General Daniel Morgan accepting British General John Burgoyne's sword at the surrender that followed the October 1777 Battle of Saratoga, the engagement that brought France into the Revolutionary War on the American side. The Mint produced 1,177,515 pieces, matching the uniform 2015 NIFC figure and rounding out a fourth-year run that totaled roughly 5.89 million S-mint business strikes across all five designs.

Authentication is finish identification rather than a fabric test. The piece is a business strike with cartwheel luster across the fields, distinct from the 2015-S clad and silver proofs of the same design that share the S mintmark but carry mirrored fields and frosted devices. Field reflection is the separator: cartwheel rotation reads business strike, deep mirror reads proof. Fox's surrender composition is one of the more figure-heavy designs in the ATB program, with two officers and their respective swords as the focal points, and on a NIFC business strike the figural detail reads with the standard Mint State soft definition rather than the high-contrast frosted relief a proof produces. The clad composition (75% copper-nickel over a pure copper core, 5.67 grams, 24.26 mm) is the standard Washington quarter formula since 1965.

This is a Regular-classification issue with crossover demand beyond NIFC-set completists. The Saratoga design has constituencies among Revolutionary War collectors and New York regional specialists in addition to the standard NIFC-run buyers, since the surrender scene depicts one of the most consequential moments in American independence history. Population reports at MS67 are well-supplied, MS68 examples come up regularly, and pricing follows the NIFC norm of modest premiums for raw examples and small step-ups at certified gem grades. Set builders working through the 45-entry NIFC run pick the issue up at near-retail through dealer inventory. For the broader story of the ATB program and the NIFC collector-only product line, see the Washington ATB series history.