1819 Peculiar 9, believed to be struck over 1818. -- W. Elliot Woodward, 1862.A pristine gem, awash with lustrous cartwheel over ideally frosty deep gray surfaces that reveal the merest hints of bright color when lit. Stellar quality for any coin of this era, with a strike as bold as its visual appeal. No areas of softness can be found, and no marks of consequence are present. A pair of contact points before Libertys lips and another behind the eagles head may be all that separate this coin from an even more wondrous numerical grade. Coined from an early state of the dies with no cracks or other anomalies. The overdate, chiefly visible as an extra area of metal between the tip of the lower loop of the 9 and the closed top loop, is seen under low magnification.Five different obverse dies of 1819 show an 1819/8 overdate, though one obverse (used in the Overton-105 die marriage) has inspired some disagreement on its status. Overtons obverse 2 was used in two different pairings (Overton-102 and Overton-103), making for six total 1819/8 die varieties. Breen divides them simply into the Small 9, Italic 5 on reverse (Overton-101), the Large 9, Italic 5 (Overton-102 and 103), and the Large 9, Upright 5 (Overton 104 through 106). As many as five different die varieties were known to J. Colvin Randall, as published in the Haseltine Type-Table in 1881, but even earlier the overdates of 1819 caught the attention of catalogers. In W. Elliot Woodwards Finotti Collection sale of September 1862, he describes one lot as "1819 Peculiar 9, equally fine, believed to be struck over 1818." The same sale included 1817/3, 1818/7, and 1820/19 overdates alongside their "perfect date" counterparts, suggesting that interest in overdate varieties extends to the very earliest era of date collecting.Cataloged as the finest 1819 half dollar ever graded by PCGS when it was offered in 1989, this specimen has never relinquished that title. Today, more than 25 years later, PCGS has certified just three coins of this date at the MS-66 level. All three of them are in the D. Brent Pogue Collection. Among other high grade examples from these dies are the Winsor-Eliasberg-Kaufman and Soros coins, both graded MS-66 by NGC, but this piece stands alone among Overton-102s atop the PCGS Population Report. The best evidence for its status as finest known is the voice of the market: this coins May 2008 price realized was nearly twice what the Eliasberg-Kaufman coin brought in 2009 and more than 70% higher than the price of the Soros coin when it sold in 2014.
