FOUND – on 8th St., a small leather wallet containing a $5 Kentucky note, a half dollar, and ninepence, in silver, which the owner can have by paying for this advertisement, and calling on Dr. J. Cobb, Jefferson St.” — The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, January 31, 1839</em>A beautiful blend of deep olive blue and pewter gray covers the surfaces, showing more blue on the reverse and contrasting with silvery brilliance on both sides. Frost is seen as the thoroughly lustrous surfaces are viewed from every angle, and cartwheel spins in abundance when rotated in hand. The strike is excellent, showing just trivial weakness at the center of star 1 and a hint of softness on the eagle’s talon at right. The strike is helped by a die state that is slightly earlier than that seen on the previous specimen, though both dies were heavily fractured in this state as well. All of the cracks described on the example offered in the previous lot are present, but each of them are lighter here, particularly the vertical crack from A of STATES across the beak. The surfaces and eye appeal are similarly choice, and only a couple of trivial contact points in the lower right obverse field separate the spectacular quality of this example from the ever-so-slightly finer preservation of the coin offered in the previous lot.Three obverse dies and three reverse dies are known for the 1839-O issue, combined to make five different varieties. Among them, this is far and away the most plentiful, but it is also perhaps the most historic, as only the GR-1 uses the same reverse die as the legendary 1838-O half dollars. The earliest state of this die combination is found on a small number of specially struck coins, referred to as either Specimens or Branch Mint Proofs, which exhibit similar surface texture to the 1838-O halves. Five such coins have been positively identified. Just one has been graded by PCGS, assigned a grade of Specimen-62; the finest known among these pieces is estimated to grade just Proof-64.Gem survivors of the circulation mintage of 1839-O half dollars are nearly as rare as the elusive Specimens. The recorded mintage for the date is 116,000 coins, most of which were immediately put into use in the busy commercial region centered in New Orleans. In 1842, Philadelphia Mint assayers Jacob Eckfeldt and William DuBois called New Orleans “the commercial emporium of the Southwest,” serving as the principal banking and trading hub of the lower Mississippi Valley. Nearly all river trade downstream from the forks of the Ohio at Pittsburgh passed through New Orleans. The 832,000 bales of cotton that were exported from New Orleans between October 1, 1839 and September 30, 1840 surpassed the cotton traffic of all other American ports combined. The city dominated the export of other products of the American interior, from apples to tobacco, and played a similarly important role in imports from Europe, the West Indies and Latin America, and Africa. The Mississippi River and its tributaries made coins from New Orleans more commonplace in Louisville than coins from Philadelphia. Though the lost wallet described in the advertisement above this description was found a bit too early in the year to have held a coin of this issue, New Orleans minted half dollars would fill the pockets of Kentuckians before the year ended. The so-called ninepence found in the misplaced wallet was a one real, struck at one of many mints of Central and South America.With fine toning and a fine provenance, this specimen exceeds even its technical equals in desirability. PCGS has graded an 1839-O half dollar on 494 occasions. Just nine of those grading events have surpassed MS-64, and the only coin ever assigned a higher grade than this one is offered in the preceding lot. PCGS# 6181. NGC ID: 24G7.
