1879-O Morgan Dollar

The 1879-O is the inaugural New Orleans Morgan Dollar at 2,887,000 pieces and the first silver-dollar issue from the re-opened Louisiana mint after a nineteen-year hiatus that began with the Civil War shutdown in 1861. New Orleans had remained closed throughout Reconstruction and reopened specifically to handle the Bland-Allison Act silver-dollar coinage that was overwhelming the Philadelphia and San Francisco production schedules. The 1879-O carries the standard Reverse of 1879 hub configuration and reflects the typical New Orleans strike pattern that would define the O-mint Morgan run for the next twenty-five years. The Mint Director's office assigned roughly twenty percent of the year's three-mint output to New Orleans.

Strike quality on the 1879-O is consistent with the broader New Orleans pattern across the Morgan series: weak central detail on Liberty's hair above the ear and softness on the eagle's breast feathers. The O-mint dies in 1879 had not yet developed the worst pattern of late-1880s and 1890s New Orleans work, but the first-year strike still falls behind both Philadelphia and Carson City for the same period. Most surviving examples grade VF to MS62 from circulation and broken Treasury bag releases, with PCGS, the Professional Coin Grading Service, and NGC populations clustering at MS62 and MS63. MS64 is available and MS65 is condition-scarce, with the strike-related grade ceiling adding meaningful premium at the top tier across the certified pool.

The 1879-O is a regular common date and the standard first-year-of-issue pickup for collectors building a New Orleans Morgan Dollar set. Pricing has held flat for two decades at small premiums above the matched 1878 Philadelphia and 1879 Philadelphia common-date level. The 1879-O pairs naturally with the 1880-O and 1881-O at the entry-grade level for O-mint date-set collectors, all three of which share the typical strike-quality profile and modest pricing. For the New Orleans Mint reopening context and the Bland-Allison Act production-distribution story, see the Morgan Dollar series history.