1797 Draped Bust Silver Dollar. BB-73, B-1. Rarity-3. Stars 9x7, Large Letters. EF-40 (PCGS). Handsome EF surfaces exhibit mottled steel-olive overtones to a base of warm sandy-gray patina. The appearance is impressively smooth for an early dollar that saw enough commercial use to acquire 20 points of wear. Said wear is largely confined to the high points, as befits the grade, and there is plenty of sharp detail remaining in the recesses of the design elements. Expertly centered in strike with full, uniform denticulation encircling both sides. Salyards Die State I.<p>Bowers-Borckardt 73 is the sole die marriage associated with the Stars 9x7, Large Letters <em>Guide Book</em> variety of the 1797 silver dollar, and it is the median scarcity among the three known die pairings of the issue. Plentiful in an absolute sense, at least by early dollar standards, Harry E. Salyards (2022) estimates that 500 to 850 BB-73 dollars are extant in all grades. The author assigns Die State I examples, as here, to the 4,694 coins delivered on January 30, 1798. With most survivors of this die pairing as a whole grading no finer than VF, the conditionally challenging nature of the BB-73 dollar comes to the fore at the EF level. The present example is among the finer available to todays numismatists. PCGS# 40003. NGC ID: 24X4. From the Legacy Collection. Earlier ex Hesselgesser Collection; Heritages CSNS Signature Auction of May 2022, lot 4167.
