When I moved here I brought everything with me, but sometime between then and now, most of the non-silver and some of my junk silver too got dumped into various containers and put into storage unsorted. The last few weeks I've been slowly going through some of these unsorted containers and organizing it a little. In many cases that basically means just sorting all like coins into their own jar, but hey, baby steps, eh?
Today I want to look at this guy:
I've always heard it referred to as a V nickel and so that's what I've always used myself, but most collector guides list it as a "Liberty Head Nickel". Either name works. Whatever you call it, it's a pretty nice coin!
It was minted from 1883 to 1913. It was designed by Charles Edward Barber so it goes well with the other Barber designs. I have his quarter somewhere around here, but I don't know where yet. Here's his dime and half with the nickel:
All his designs are nice and classical. A little boring, but still nice. Of the Barber coins, this is my favorite. Well, I mean the others are 90% silver and this one isn't, so that kind of makes those better overall, but looking at the design itself, I like this one most.
The first version of this coin didn't include the word "cents" on the back. But what criminals soon learned was that this coin was very similar in size to the half-eagle, so they'd gild the nickel and try to pass it off as the $5 gold coin for a nice profit! I suppose most people hadn't actually ever seen a half-eagle, so the scheme worked, the V being taken to mean 5 dollars instead of 5 cents. In light of that, the mint quickly added the word "cents".
via Wikipedia
I don't have a half-eagle, so I can't compare, but this would have been the one minted at the time, so you can kind of see how someone could easily mistake one for another if they weren't very familar with the more valuable coin and if the nickel had been covered with a layer of gold.
For comparisons I can do... Well, I don't think I actually have any Jefferson nickel's around here. I might have some of the 40% silver war nickels somewhere, but I don't remember. At least I can't find any right now. And I don't have any Shield nickels (which came before), though I'd love to buy one sometime. But here the V nickel is with the Buffalo nickel:
As far as I have ever read, the V nickel was fairly popular, but it lost out to Teddy Roosevelt's efforts to modernize US coinage for the new century. Gotta admit, the Buffalo nickel that replaced it was the much better design, but like I said, this one still has that classical feeling going for it which makes it a great one to have in a collection. I do wish the one I had was in better shape, but as you might imagine from the age of these, coins in good condition can go for quite a bit. That in mind, this one is enough for me.
Thoughts?
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Mastodon. |
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