1797 Draped Bust Silver Dollar. BB-71, B-3. Rarity-2. Stars 10x6. AU-53 (PCGS). Virtually full, frosty mint luster shines forth powerfully from both sides of this virtually brilliant example. There is a bit of delicate champagne-apricot peripheral iridescence on both sides, along with a swath of warmer olive-gray at the upper right reverse border. Sharply defined in all but a few isolated areas, there is little in the way of actual circulation here, just a bit of light numismatic handling that separates this coin from a higher AU grade. Salyards Die State I.<p>The admission of Tennessee into the Union in 1797 presented a conundrum for Mint engravers regarding adding a 16th star to the obverse. Three known dies have been identified with the stars arranged in two configurations. Two dies were prepared with 9 stars left and 7 right and a solitary die with 10 stars left and 6 stars right. While it had been customary to add a star for each new state, this was becoming unsustainable. In 1798 the number was fixed at 13 to reflect the original colonies, though there was a 15 star obverse that was briefly used that same year. Typical for early Mint records, the precise number struck is not known. The official mintage of 7,776 silver dollars struck that calendar year is exceptionally low considering the number of coins extant for all varieties of the 1797-dated issue. In fact, Harry E. Salyards (2022) estimates that 41,872 coins were struck from the Stars 10x6 die pairing, now known as BB-71, which includes 30,372 delivered on January 5, 1798, and an additional 11,500 or so delivered February 16, 1798. Of the 650 to 1,100 believed extant, few are better than VF, and this AU is also more sharply struck than typical of the attribution. It is a significant coin worthy of the strongest bids. PCGS# 6865. NGC ID: 24X4. From the Legacy Collection. Earlier from our (Stacks) sale of the Golding Collection, June 1952, lot 221; our (Stacks) sale of the Harold L. Bareford Collection, October 1981, lot 410; Sheridan Downeys Fixed Price List of March 2022. Bareford sale lot tag and collector envelopes with provenance notes included.
