Seated Liberty Quarters (1838–1891)

Gobrecht's Design and Why It Lasted 53 Years

The Seated Liberty quarter that appeared in 1838 carried a design Christian Gobrecht had been developing since at least 1835, first applied to the pattern silver dollars of 1836 and then adapted for the dime and half dime in 1837. For the quarter, the seated figure reached a larger canvas: Liberty seated on a rock, her left hand raising a pole topped with a Liberty cap, her right resting on a Union Shield with LIBERTY inscribed across it. Thirteen stars surround her on the obverse. The reverse presents a heraldic eagle with a Union Shield on its breast, arrows and an olive branch in its talons, and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA around the periphery with the denomination QUAR. DOL. below. Robert Ball Hughes modified the design circa 1840, adding a fold of drapery at Liberty's elbow, and that adjusted portrait carried forward through the remaining production years.¹

The design served 53 years and six recognized types, longer than any other quarter design of the nineteenth century. Its longevity was not accident: the image was dignified, the relief workable at high-volume production, and the various modifications required over the decades to signal weight changes could be applied to the existing design without replacing it. The same figure that had stood for one type accommodated arrows at the date, rays around the eagle, a motto above the eagle, and their subsequent removals, each time returning to essentially the same composition. A type set, a date-and-mintmark set and a die-variety set can each be built from this one design.

Six Types Across 53 Years

The 1853 Weight Reduction: Rays, Then Arrows, Then Neither

The California Gold Rush disrupted silver values across the American economy by the early 1850s. As the gold price of silver rose, the silver content of subsidiary coins became worth more as bullion than as denomination, and coins began disappearing from circulation into the hands of speculators who could profit by melting them. Congress answered with the Act of February 21, 1853, reducing the weight of the quarter from 103.125 grains (6.68 grams) to 96 grains (6.22 grams). Arrowheads were placed at the date and radiating rays added around the eagle to signal the change to anyone handling coins. In February 1853, before the new law was enacted on February 21, the Philadelphia Mint delivered approximately 44,200 quarters at the old weight standard, without arrows or rays. These 1853 No Arrows quarters are scarce: PCGS CoinFacts estimates about 500 survivors in all grades, from a mintage that was largely melted once it had intrinsic value over face.²

The rays were abandoned after one year because they dramatically accelerated die wear. From 1854 through 1855 the arrows remained but the rays did not, producing a two-year type. From 1856, the arrows too were removed, and the lighter weight continued in production without visual signal. When the Coinage Act of 1873 made a minor further adjustment, increasing the quarter's weight from 6.22 to 6.25 grams to align American coinage with metric standards, the sequence repeated: arrows at the date for 1873 and 1874 only, then removed again. The 1873 No Arrows, Closed 3 Philadelphia quarter from the transition period, with a mintage of approximately 40,000, is itself a genuinely scarce coin in any condition.³

Civil War Philadelphia and San Francisco

By 1862 silver had vanished from Eastern commerce through hoarding, replicating the same pattern that affected the dime and half dollar. Philadelphia quarter mintages collapsed: business-strike production for 1863 through 1866 totaled 360,800 pieces across four years, and each successive date shrank sharply. The 1863 Philadelphia quarter, with approximately 191,600 business strikes, is one of the more common of the Civil War dates; the 1864 at approximately 93,600 and the 1865 at approximately 58,800 are progressively scarcer; the 1866 With Motto fell to only approximately 16,800. The Philadelphia dimes of the same years are rarer; the quarters are uncommon coins whose low mintages the general market tends to overlook.

San Francisco, unaffected by Eastern monetary disruption, struck quarters in every war year except 1863, though in small numbers: 96,000 in 1861, 67,000 in 1862, 20,000 in 1864 and 41,000 in 1865. The California economy operated on gold and silver rather than paper currency, and the Mint there kept striking coin for that economy through the war. These San Francisco quarters are scarcer than their Philadelphia counterparts, and the 1864-S, at 20,000 pieces, has the lowest mintage of any San Francisco Seated quarter.⁴

Carson City Quarters: Eight Years, Extreme Range

The Carson City Mint struck quarters in 1870, 1871, 1872, 1873, 1875, 1876, 1877 and 1878, eight dates (nine issues, counting both 1873-CC varieties), all bearing the CC mint mark on the reverse. The production range across those eight years is extreme. The 1876-CC had a mintage of approximately 4,944,000, circulated widely, and can be found in lower circulated grades without great difficulty. The 1871-CC had a mintage of approximately 10,890, making it one of the rarest regular-issue quarters in the entire series. The 1870-CC, the first CC quarter, is scarcer still at approximately 8,340, the 1872-CC reached approximately 22,850, and the remaining dates range from scarce to available.⁵

New Orleans quarters are characteristically weakly struck, a pattern that runs through the facility's entire silver production history. Sharp examples from New Orleans are genuine conditional rarities for many dates regardless of mintage, and a collector evaluating an O-mint Seated Liberty quarter should assess strike quality as a separate variable from surface preservation. San Francisco coins from the series are generally better struck than New Orleans but less consistently sharp than Philadelphia. The Carson City coins are variable; the early CC dates, particularly 1870 through 1872, are known for soft strikes, while the higher-mintage mid-decade dates are generally better produced.

The 1873-CC No Arrows: Five Coins from 4,000 Struck

When the Coinage Act of 1873 raised the quarter's authorized weight from 6.22 to 6.25 grams, the Carson City Mint had already struck approximately 4,000 quarters at the old standard. The new law required coins at the old standard not be released, and the 4,000 pieces were ordered melted. Five examples are known; the Mint State pieces are believed to descend from a handful of assay coins sent from Carson City to Philadelphia for the Annual Assay Commission's review. All five are from a single die marriage (Briggs 1-A, the only known die pair for the No Arrows issue), identifiable by a die scratch within the second C of the CC mint mark. Three of the five are in Mint State: the Boyd-Budd-Norweb specimen, the James A. Stack specimen, and the Eliasberg specimen. The fourth and fifth are circulated examples that presumably circulated before the issue's rarity was recognized.⁶

The Battle Born Collection example (the Norweb specimen) sold at Stack's Bowers Galleries, August 2012, PCGS Mint State 64, for $460,000. That price is the current auction record for the date and the benchmark for later offerings. The 1873-CC No Arrows is the rarest regular-issue Seated Liberty quarter by surviving population, filling the same structural role in the series that the 1873-CC No Arrows dime fills in the dime series: a melt-order rarity created by the same piece of legislation applied to different denominations at the same mint in the same year.

Building the Set

For the type collector, six coins are required: one of each recognized type. The No Drapery type (1838–1840) and the Arrows and Rays type (1853) are the most specialized acquisitions and carry meaningful premiums in any grade; the others are available at progressively more modest cost down to the With Motto type (1866–1891), where common dates in lower circulated grades represent some of the most affordable Seated Liberty silver in the entire series. A Gem (Mint State 65 or finer) six-type set would be among the most demanding collecting goals in American numismatics.

A complete date-and-mintmark set is one of the most ambitious projects in American quarter collecting. The series spans more than 100 distinct date-and-mint combinations; it contains two effective stoppers in the 1873-CC No Arrows (5 known) and the 1870-CC (8,340 struck, extremely scarce in any grade), plus a long list of dates that are genuinely scarce in higher circulated grades without being absolute rarities. The Carson City issues alone, nine coins across eight dates with mintages from 4,000 to nearly 5 million, constitute a sub-collection of their own that many specialists pursue independently. Larry Briggs's The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of United States Liberty Seated Quarters (DLRC Press, 1991) provides the die variety attributions and population analysis that serious date-set and variety collectors require.