I have made it a point in my collecting always to buy the very finest pieces for they are the most satisfactory and becoming more difficult to obtain every year. -- Harold P. Newlin to T. Harrison Garrett, October 29, 1884.The magnificent Garrett coin, with a provenance extending 130 years into the past, reappears here for the first time in three and a half decades. Beautifully toned throughout, the rich yellow gold surfaces show fine pale green highlights and shades of copper. Imbued with remarkable luster on both sides, both reflective and cartwheeling, this piece is particularly satiny on the reverse. With unimpeachable originality, the D. Brent Pogue example ranks high in the census of the few survivors known from these dies, thought to number no more than 30 and perhaps as few as half that figure. The obverse is peppered with light marks and abrasions, including a group of short scrapes in the center of the left obverse field and a horizontal abrasion between Libertys nose and star 9. The reverse is exceptionally clean and shows only a few light marks. The strike is good, perhaps not complete but certainly above average for this issue. The overdate is easily seen, as any attempts to efface the 7 underdigit were half-hearted at best. No adjustment marks are prominent, and a single well formed lintmark is spotted between RI of AMERICA.Gently cracked through the upright of E, this specimen was struck from a very early die state. A usually seen crack through the southwest two points of star 7 is barely visible here, extending only from the denticle to the point closest to it, a mere larva of what it will become. A die flaw has chipped away, appearing as an erupted blob below star 1. On the reverse, the tops of UNITED are joined with thin cracks, the same state of this reverse as is found on its previous marriage, the 1798/7 Stars 9x4 as offered in the previous lot.Researcher Saul Teichman has identified 16 ownership chains for this variety, each representing a discrete specimen. None of those provenance histories extend earlier than this one, which can be traced to the collection of Harold P. Newlin before October 1884. Anthony Taraszkas research concluded that "about fifteen specimens are positively attributed," adding that this rarity is "considered by many as the most highly prized eagle variety." The commonly published mintage figure for the 1798/7 7x6 Stars is a paltry 842 coins, though the Dannreuther-Bass work has hedged that downward to the range of 300 to 842 pieces. The 842 figure comes from the delivery data for the year 1798: Warrant 109 delivered 900 pieces to the Mint treasurer on February 17 and Warrant 110 delivered another 842 pieces on February 28. Unfortunately, the truth is not as easily resolvable as these numbers may indicate. Four January 1798 deliveries of eagles totaled 6,232 coins. Most of these were probably dated 1797, but some could have been dated 1798/7. Two varieties of 1797 eagles are known to have been struck after the two 1798/7 varieties, verifiable by die state study. The reverse of this variety appears in a later state on one 1797 variety, whose obverse is then used in a later state on another 1797 variety. These 1797-dated eagles thus factor into the tally of eagles delivered in February 1798, suggesting the delivery of 842 pieces has a very low probability of representing this variety and no others. Calculating an exact mintage is beyond the information contained in the original documents that have survived. David Akers has suggested that this variety is "two or three times as rare as the 1798/7 9x4 Stars," and both of the 1797 eagles that were actually struck in 1798 are less elusive as well.
