The primary consideration behind the establishment of the New Orleans Mint was an incoming flow of coins, and not of bullion. -- Dr. Richard Doty.The only gem 1839-O quarter eagle known, this coin is blessed with superlative aesthetic appeal. The deep even yellow gold surfaces flood with luster at every angle, frosty and satiny, beautiful to behold. Both obverse and reverse are free of any major impact marks, showing just a short scratch in the field next to star 12 and some light wispy lines besides. A splash of deeper orange toning is present at the bust truncation. The strike is excellent, showing central details that few coins of this issue can rival. The reverse shows a fascinating crack that runs along I of UNITED before branching out, its main stream through the olive leaves and 2 in the denomination to the rim, a rivulet connecting the base of I to TED.Founded by the same document that led to the establishment of branch mints in the backwater mining districts of western North Carolina and northern Georgia, the New Orleans Mint had a different character from the beginning. New Orleans mined not ore, but commerce, and the mints bullion came not from nuggets and dust, but from the coins that poured into the port city from Latin America (especially Mexico), Europe, and beyond. In 1842, the assayers of the Philadelphia Mint, Jacob R. Eckfeldt and William E. DuBois, penned A Manual of Gold and Silver Coins of All Nations, a text that became a road map for some of Americas earliest coin collectors. They describe the nature of the first three branch mints therein: "Two of these were for the coinage of gold only, and were to be situated at the towns of Charlotte in North Carolina, and Dahlonega in Georgia -- central points of the gold mining region. The third branch was for both gold and silver, and located at New Orleans, the commercial emporium of the southwest." Eckfeldt and DuBois report that, from the time the flywheels on its presses first started spinning until the end of 1841, the New Orleans Mint coined over $1.5 million worth of silver coins but just $326,190 worth of gold, far less than the mints at Charlotte and Dahlonega over the same interval. When the melter and refiner of the New Orleans Mint, John L. Riddell, wrote his own book in 1845, he focused entirely upon the sorts of silver coins he encountered in bullion deposits, both counterfeit and authentic. That gold coins were not mentioned at all suggests that they were a comparative afterthought. History supports this, as New Orleans was known at the time as the American gateway to Mexico and Latin America, lands that sent thousands of tons of generally low quality silver coins into the world market every year but, at this point, relatively little gold.Just 17,781 quarter eagles were struck in New Orleans in 1839. It was a small initial output, but the Mint added half eagles in 1840 and eagles in 1841. As a town built on commerce, New Orleans placed its gold coins into circulation immediately, and quarter eagles from the New Orleans Mint are found well worn more often than specimens of this denomination from any other mint. While some examples of this issue survive in high grades, likely put away by the New Orleans citizenry as souvenirs of the new mint, this is the only gem. Described as "the finest" by David Akers, who chose this coin to illustrate the 1839-O quarter eagle in his book, this is the single best preserved specimen, an unsurpassable example. As the only Classic Head issue of the New Orleans Mint, it is a one-year type coin, adding a special layer of desirability to its historic importance as the first gold issue from our southernmost mint.
