Half
Dollar Coin
One of the most important coins in the late nineteenth century
was the half dollar coin. Today, it is very rare that we use
a half-dollar coin to buy things with, since they are no longer
minted, but after the Civil War, it was a very popular coin.
People only made a few dollars per week in wages in those days,
so a half dollar could buy a whole lot!
After the start of the gold rush in California, gold prices
started to drop, and silver got more expensive. Less-honest
people realized that you could melt down 200 silver half-dollars
(coins worth $100) and sell the bullion (the melted-down metal)
for $106.60. Then, you could buy more silver coins, and melt
them down. If you did this over and over again, you could
make a tidy profit. Pretty soon, these people started melting
down all of the coins they could get their hands on, and coins
started disappearing from circulation. When the government
figured out what was going on, they reduced the amount of
silver in the coins so that it wouldn’t be profitable
to melt them down any more. To make it clear that the new
coins had less silver in them, the coins were minted with
arrows on either side of the date. That way, people would
know they had less silver in them, and they would stop melting
them down.
The “Barber
design” half-dollar coins were minted from 1892 until
1915.
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