Liberty Head V Nickels (1883–1912)

A New Design After Seventeen Years of the Shield

By the early 1880s there was broad agreement that the Shield nickel had run its course. The design had been widely criticized since its introduction in 1866, its copper-nickel alloy continued to challenge the dies, and Charles E. Barber, who had succeeded to the position of Chief Engraver in 1880, had been engaged to develop a replacement. Barber was assigned to produce consistent new designs for several base-metal denominations simultaneously. In the end only the five-cent piece moved forward, entering production on January 30, 1883, with the first coins placed in circulation on February 1. The last Shield nickel Proofs were struck on June 26, 1883, formally closing out the prior series.

Barber's design reflects the neoclassical aesthetic that characterized his career. The obverse shows Liberty facing left, wearing a coronet on which LIBERTY is inscribed. Thirteen six-pointed stars encircle the portrait, and the date appears below. The reverse carries a large Roman numeral V at center, partially enclosed in a wreath of corn, cotton, and wheat. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA arcs around the top inside the rim. The coin weighs five grams and uses the same 75:25 copper-nickel alloy as the Shield nickel it replaced, but at 21.2 millimeters in diameter it is wider than the Shield nickel's 20.5 millimeters.¹

The Omission of CENTS and the Racketeer Nickels

The most consequential decision in the initial design was what it left out. No word specifying the denomination appeared anywhere on the first 1883 nickels. Treasury Secretary Charles Folger sent back Barber's first designs late in 1882 because the law required UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on the reverse, then approved a revised version that still carried no denomination. Leaving off the denomination was consistent with precedent: the three-cent pieces had circulated for years identified only by Roman numerals, and the nickel's size, weight, and plain edge were considered sufficient to distinguish it in ordinary commerce.

Swindlers saw an opening in the missing word. The new nickel was close in diameter to the five-dollar gold half eagle. Gold-plated and reeded along the edge, a plated nickel could plausibly be presented to an unwary recipient as a five-dollar gold piece, yielding a fraudulent profit of $4.95 on each one passed. Within weeks of the coin's release, plated examples were circulating in this capacity. The scheme became notorious enough to be remembered as the Racketeer Nickel fraud, and genuine period-plated examples, as distinct from modern souvenir productions, are historical artifacts of some interest requiring specialist authentication.²

The Mint responded by directing Barber to modify the design. The word CENTS was added below the V at the bottom of the reverse, and E PLURIBUS UNUM was relocated above the wreath to accommodate the new inscription. The revised coin went into production within a few months of the original's release. Both the No CENTS and With CENTS varieties carry the date 1883, the only year in the series with two distinct types. Approximately 5.5 million No CENTS coins had been struck before the revision; the With CENTS coins followed with over 16 million pieces.

The Treasury never recalled the No CENTS coins, but rumors that it would, and that the coins would then become rare, led the public to hoard them. The No CENTS 1883 nickel became one of the most saved coins in American numismatic history. It is substantially more available today in Mint State than the With CENTS 1883, which circulated heavily and is the conditionally scarcer of the two at the highest grade levels.

The Design Serves Thirty Years of Commerce

With the CENTS inscription in place the design was essentially stable from 1883 through 1912. Barber's Liberty Head nickel served American commerce through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era largely without numismatic controversy. An 1890 law barred changing a coin design until it had been in use for 25 years unless Congress authorized the change. The same law, however, allowed the five-cent piece to be redesigned "as soon as practicable" after its passage. Pattern alternatives were tested in 1885, 1896 and 1909, but none displaced Barber's design until James Earle Fraser's Buffalo nickel replaced it in 1913.³

The Liberty Head nickel also fed the new economy of coin-operated machines. Vending machines, arcade equipment, public telephones, and nickelodeon theaters, the five-cent movie houses that gave the era one of its most recognizable names, all relied on the nickel as a standard unit of exchange. The Liberty Head nickel circulated into this infrastructure heavily and continuously, which helps explain why even common dates are genuinely worn in typical grades and why Gem examples are harder to find than mintages alone would predict.

Key Dates and the Branch Mint Issues

All Liberty Head nickels from 1883 through 1911 were struck exclusively at the Philadelphia Mint and carry no mint mark. Branch mint production did not begin until 1912, the series' final year of regular coinage, when both the Denver Mint (D) and the San Francisco Mint (S) joined Philadelphia. The mint marks appear on the reverse to the left of CENTS.

The three key dates are the 1885, the 1886, and the 1912-S. The 1885, with a mintage of 1,473,300, is the scarcest regular-issue business strike in lower circulated grades. An economic downturn in the mid-1880s suppressed demand for minor coinage, and the Treasury's reissuance of worn coins in circulation further depressed new production. The 1886, at approximately 3,326,000 pieces, is the second-scarcest date and a conditional rarity at Mint State 66 and above, where it is actually harder to locate than the 1885. The 1912-S, struck over four business days beginning December 24, 1912, had a total mintage of 238,000, the lowest of any regular business strike in the series. On December 28, 1912, Mayor James Rolph Jr. paid the inaugural fare aboard San Francisco Municipal Railway Car Number 1 with one of the first forty 1912-S nickels minted, opening the first publicly owned big-city streetcar line in the United States. The 1912-D, Denver's sole contribution to the series, had a mintage of approximately 8,474,000 coins.⁴

The 1913 Liberty Head Nickel: Five Coins That Should Not Exist

The Buffalo nickel replaced the Liberty Head design beginning in 1913. Official Mint records show no Liberty Head nickels produced that year. The existence of any 1913 Liberty Head nickel was unknown to the general numismatic public until December 1919, when Samuel W. Brown, a former Philadelphia Mint employee who had served as assistant curator of the Mint's coin collection and as storekeeper, placed an advertisement in The Numismatist offering $500 for any 1913 Liberty Head nickel in proof condition. The following August, Brown displayed one such coin at the American Numismatic Association convention in Chicago, with a label valuing it at $600.⁵

The circumstances of the 1913 coins' creation have never been definitively established. Brown's prior employment at the Mint in 1913, his placement of a wanted advertisement for a coin no one else knew existed, and his later possession of all five known examples have led most numismatic historians to conclude that Brown was involved in their unauthorized production. Whether he struck them himself, arranged for them to be struck, or obtained them through some other means is not documented. The Mint has no official record of their production.

Two of the five coins have proof surfaces; the other three were struck by standard methods. Brown sold all five in 1924, the group passing through dealers August Wagner, Stephen K. Nagy, and Wayte Raymond before being purchased as a set by Colonel E.H.R. Green, son of the celebrated Gilded Age investor Hetty Green. The set remained together through Green's death in 1936, after which his estate sold all five to dealers Eric P. Newman and B.G. Johnson for $2,000. Newman and Johnson broke up the set and sold the coins individually over the next seven years. Each has since carried a collector's name as its pedigree designation: the Norweb, Eliasberg, Olsen, Walton, and McDermott specimens.⁶

The subsequent history of the individual coins is among the most extensively documented ownership chains in American numismatics. The Norweb specimen is at the Smithsonian Institution. The McDermott specimen is at the American Numismatic Association's Money Museum in Colorado Springs, the only one of the five with actual circulation marks, reportedly from being carried in a pocket by J.V. McDermott, a Milwaukee collector who passed it around to strangers in taverns. The Walton specimen disappeared from the numismatic record after George Walton's death in a car accident in 1962, when experts judged it an altered-date fake; it passed to his sister in Virginia and spent the next forty years in a family closet. It was authenticated at the 2003 ANA convention in Baltimore, the first time all five coins had been assembled since the 1940s, and sold at Heritage Auctions in April 2013 for $3,172,500. The Eliasberg specimen, graded Proof 66 by PCGS and considered the finest known, sold for $4,150,000 in 2005 and $5 million in a 2007 private sale. The Olsen specimen appeared in the December 1973 episode of the television series Hawaii Five-O titled "The $100,000 Nickel" and sold for $3,737,500 at Heritage Auctions in January 2010.⁷

Dealer and promoter B. Max Mehl ran a years-long newspaper campaign offering to buy any 1913 Liberty Head nickel, an offer he used to sell his Star Rare Coin Encyclopedia. His marketing contributed substantially to the coin's legendary status in popular numismatic culture, and the 1913 Liberty Head nickel has remained one of the most recognized coins in the United States ever since.

Building the Set

The Liberty Head nickel is one of the more accessible long-running nineteenth-century series for the date-set collector. Apart from the 1885 and 1886, the Philadelphia dates are available at modest prices in circulated grades. The series becomes genuinely expensive only at the 1885, 1886, and 1912-S, with the 1913 requiring a separate financial category entirely.

Strike quality is a meaningful consideration throughout. Fully struck examples with sharp hair detail on Liberty's coronet and complete wreath definition on the reverse are noticeably less common than mintages would suggest, particularly for early dates and the 1912 branch mint coins. The 1912-S is often softly struck, especially on Liberty's hair below LIBERTY and on the ear of corn at the lower left of the reverse. Proofs were struck every year from 1883 through 1912 and are available at moderate prices for most dates in Proof 63 through Proof 65; the 1885 and 1886 Proofs carry premiums consistent with their business strike scarcity. Authentication is essential for the key dates, all of which have been counterfeited, and essential for any 1913 candidate, where the field is essentially all fakes. Peters and Mohon's The Complete Guide to Shield and Liberty Head Nickels provides the standard variety catalogue for the series.