Rich chocolate brown surfaces support traces of vivid orange red clinging to some of the devices and faint highlights of steel. A very beautiful brown cent with impressive depth in the luster and strong cartwheels through the fields as the coin is rotated in the light. A few spots of deeper patina are noted near OF and at the IT of UNITED. The former has some very faint abrasions from an ill-advised attempt to diminish it, but this is seen only under magnification.Nicely struck with good sharpness throughout the design features, this piece shows some faint flowlines in the fields, typical for this middle die state, Grellmans State-b. In later states, the outermost date digits become connected to the dentils, but this piece was struck before that stage of advanced fatigue.The cents of 1854 are somewhat more elusive in extremely high grades than other cents of the 1850s. PCGS has graded eight coins finer within the MS-66 grade, these each having a bit more color with one called red. Only a single coin has been assigned a higher numerical grade, that for another brown example. Still, this data considers only the date. As for the variety, this coin ranks at the top of the Noyes Condition Census and was called CC#1 by Grellman as well.
