Liberty Head Nickels (V)

The design entered production in 1883, and the first version immediately created a problem that has become one of the most famous stories in American numismatic history. The original reverse carried the V but no indication that the coin was worth five cents. The word CENTS did not appear anywhere on the coin. Enterprising criminals quickly realized that the nickel was close enough in size to the five-dollar gold half eagle that it could be gold-plated and passed to the unwary as a five-dollar piece. The scheme reportedly worked often enough to cause real concern, and the Mint responded within months by adding CENTS below the V on the reverse. The "No CENTS" variety of 1883 was produced in large numbers, over five million pieces, and people immediately began hoarding them in the belief that the error would make them valuable. As a result, the 1883 No CENTS nickel is one of the most common dates in the series in mint state, a coin that everybody saved because they thought it was rare and that turned out not to be rare at all because everybody saved it. The "With CENTS" version, produced for the remainder of 1883 and all subsequent years, is actually scarcer in high grades despite being the "corrected" type.

Whether the gold-plating fraud was as widespread as the stories suggest is debatable. Bowers has pointed out that the tale grew in the telling, and the most famous version, involving a deaf-mute named Josh Tatum who supposedly passed the gold-plated nickels and could not be convicted because he never verbally claimed they were gold coins, may be apocryphal. The story is too good to fact-check too aggressively, which is probably why it has survived for over a century.

Production ran from 1883 through 1912, thirty years that covered the tail end of the Gilded Age and the progressive era. Annual mintages were generally in the millions, with Philadelphia handling the bulk of production and a few branch-mint issues appearing late in the run. San Francisco struck Liberty Head nickels in 1912 only, and Denver in 1912 only, making the 1912-D and 1912-S the sole branch-mint issues. Both are semi-keys, with the 1912-S at 238,000 pieces being the scarcer of the two and one of the lower-mintage issues in the series.

The Mint produced Liberty Head nickels exclusively at Philadelphia from 1883 through 1911, which keeps the series simple from a mintmark standpoint. Mintages dipped into the low millions during economic downturns and climbed above 20 million in boom years. The 1885 and 1886 are the key dates among business strikes, with the 1886 at just over 3.3 million pieces and the 1885 at about 1.5 million. Neither is rare in an absolute sense, but in the context of a series where most dates were struck in quantities exceeding 10 million, they stand out. The 1912-S, at 238,000, is the most challenging regular-issue coin in the set, and mint-state examples are genuinely scarce.

Proofs were struck every year from 1883 through 1912, in quantities ranging from about 1,500 to over 4,000 per year. They are handsome coins, well struck on polished planchets, and more readily available than proofs of many other series because the mintages were relatively generous by nineteenth-century standards. The 1883 No CENTS proof is the most popular, combining the first-year-of-type appeal with the famous missing-denomination story.

And then there is the 1913. Five Liberty Head nickels are known dated 1913, and the Mint did not authorize their production. The coins were almost certainly struck clandestinely by Samuel Brown, a Mint employee who had access to the dies and the presses. Brown placed an advertisement in The Numismatist in December 1919 offering to buy 1913 Liberty Head nickels, which was a peculiar thing to advertise for unless you already knew they existed because you had made them. All five coins have been traced and accounted for, passing through some of the most prominent collections in numismatic history, and one sold at auction in 2018 for over four million dollars. The 1913 Liberty Head nickel is not a regular-issue coin by any definition, but it has been collected and catalogued alongside the series for so long that excluding it feels pointless. It is probably the most famous American coin after the 1804 dollar, and considerably more interesting as a story.

A nickel in the 1883 to 1912 period was a useful coin. It bought a beer at most saloons, a newspaper, a ride on the streetcar, or a hot dog from a street vendor. The nickel anchored the lower end of cash transactions in an era before widespread use of vending machines and coin-operated devices, though by the early 1900s the coin-op industry was beginning to build its business model around the five-cent piece. Nickel slot machines, nickelodeons (the early movie theaters that charged a nickel for admission), and coin-operated arcade games all emerged during the Liberty Head era, tying the denomination to a new kind of commercial culture that would only grow in the decades ahead. The coins themselves held up well in circulation. The copper-nickel alloy was durable, and Barber's design, with its relatively low relief, did not wear down as quickly as some of the more detailed silver issues of the same period. Liberty Head nickels from the 1890s and 1900s commonly survive in grades that would be unusual for silver coins of comparable age, a reflection of both the harder alloy and the sheer volume of coins produced. The series ended in 1913, replaced by James Earle Fraser's Buffalo nickel, and the transition was more dramatic than most. Barber's staid classical portrait gave way to a Native American chief and an American bison, and the nickel suddenly looked like an entirely different country's coin. The Liberty Head had served reliably for three decades, but reliable was about to go out of style.

Sources: Q. David Bowers, A Guide Book of Shield and Liberty Head Nickels (Whitman Publishing, 2006); Walter Breen, Walter Breen's Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial Coins (Doubleday, 1988); R.S. Yeoman & Jeff Garrett, A Guide Book of United States Coins (Whitman Publishing, 2025); PCGS CoinFacts.