With its darkened silver surface and coppery-gold hues, the more than 130-year-old dime may not look especially remarkable at first glance.
But the 1894-S Barber dime is considered one of the rarest coins in American numismatics. On Sept. 1, one example sold for $1,250,500 at auction, more than 260 times the amount a teenage collector paid for it nearly seven decades ago.
That collector was Q. David Bowers, who purchased the coin for $4,750 at age 19 in 1957. The headline-grabbing purchase helped launch what would become a prominent career in the rare-coin world, but the story behind the dime stretches back much further.
The coin’s value comes largely from its rarity.
Minted in San Francisco in 1894, the dime was produced during a period of economic hardship following the Panic of 1893, when demand for newly minted currency had declined sharply. As a result, the San Francisco Mint struck just 24 of the coins in June 1894.
Today, only nine examples are confirmed to exist, though experts believe others may have survived. Because so few are known, and many remain in private collections for years or even decades, opportunities to buy one are exceptionally rare.
“The mere mention of this coin is enough to attract the attention of even casual collectors,” auction house Stack’s Bowers said, describing the 1894-S as one of the classic rarities in coin collecting.
Bowers recognized the coin’s significance when it came up for auction in 1957 with an estimated value of $5,000. He ultimately purchased it for $4,750, a sum that drew national attention at the time.
“In 1957, I paid the record price of $4,750 for a beautiful uncirculated 1894-S dime,” Bowers wrote in a 2015 column for Coin World.
He later sold the coin for $6,000, though its value continued to rise dramatically over the following decades.
Before this year’s sale, only five 1894-S Barber dimes had appeared at auction since 2005, according to Stack’s Bowers. Those coins sold for between $1.3 million and $2.16 million.
The example once owned by Bowers had not appeared at auction in 36 years. It previously sold for $77,000 in 1987 and $93,500 in 1990.
This year, it returned to the auction block with an estimated value of $1.5 million.
On Sept. 1, the coin sold for $1,250,500, adding another chapter to the story of one of the rarest dimes ever produced.
This story was originally reported in Spanish for Telemundo.
