1851 $10 Baldwin & Co. MS(PCGS#10031)

February 2026 Showcase Auction - The James A. Stack, Sr. Collection Part II

경매인

Stack's Bowers

로트 번호

23063

등급

AU58

가격

240,000

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An extraordinary example of this great rarity, one of the very finest survivors by virtue of not only its high grade, but its strike and aesthetic appeal as well. Boldly lustrous medium yellow gold surfaces show a fine pale green hue on both sides. This is the best struck example of this issue we have encountered, with full bold detail on both the obverse portrait and the eagle on the reverse. While not entirely free of softness, this piece shows a vastly superior impression to most, a characteristic that connoisseurs of the territorial gold series will likely weight even more significantly than this piece's superb technical grade. Some shallow planchet striations run parallel on a vector from 9 o'clock to 2 o'clock atop the obverse, as struck and harming nothing. Aside from trivial hairlines and a couple contact marks under Liberty's chin, there are no defects worthy of note. It's truly remarkable how attractive and well preserved this piece is.<p>The typical softness of the 1851 Baldwin $10s underscores the issues the Baldwin operation had with their equipment. The Horseman type required two strikes to bring it up to full relief. While the first edition Kagin reference suggests these were struck from "concave dies," it appears they really just had trouble achieving sufficient striking pressure to fully strike up the central devices. This piece, like all 1851 Baldwin $10s we've seen, was struck just once. Unlike most, it shows a nearly full strike, a remarkable contrast to most surviving examples, including the NGC MS-62 that stands as the finest certified at either service. Given the choice between a well struck AU-58 and a softly struck MS-62, we believe many collectors (including James A. Stack, Sr.) would choose the former over the latter.<p>The first appearance we find of an 1851 Baldwin $10 at auction was in Lyman Low's July 1902 sale of the collection of Georg F. Ulex of Hamburg, Germany. Rich with good territorial gold coins (and lots of other rarities), lot 570 was included on a laid-in addendum sheet. Low described the 1851 Baldwin $10 issue, deeming it "extremely rare," but then continuing on at Low-like length: "I find no record in the 409 auction sales that have taken place during the past 19 years, and do not know if a public offering of this piece was made even prior to that time." Low couldn't find one, and we couldn't either.<p>This specimen first appears on the published record in 1914, when H.O. Granberg of Oshkosh, Wisconsin displayed it at the American Numismatic Society's Exhibition of United States and Colonial Coins. Coins from the Granberg Collection are illustrated on Plates 34 through 36 of the <em>Exhibition</em> catalog, along with one coin on Plate 37. This coin is photographed on Plate 36. The same exact photograph appears again in three different Wayte Raymond publications. First, Raymond used this coin to illustrate his 1931 <em>Private Gold Coins Struck in the United States, 1830-1861</em>, where this coin is plated on page 15. Next, this coin appears in the July 1939 issue of Wayte Raymond's<em> Coin Collectors Journal</em>, a house organ that was both an important journal of its era and a sales vehicle for Raymond's inventory and auctions. This coin is offered with a one-line description on page 75, calling it "Extremely Fine and of the highest rarity" with a hefty retail price of $600, and is illustrated on the following page. The same illustration turns up again in Wayte Raymond's <em>Standard Catalogue</em>, where this piece continues as the plate coin through the famous 1957 18th Edition, which incorporated research and writing by John J. Ford, Jr. and Walter Breen. While Granberg's coins appeared in three B. Max Mehl auctions in the 1910s and a U.S. Coin Company auction of Wayte Raymond's in 1915, some of his rarities transacted privately, and this appears to be one of them.<p>B. Max Mehl was the most recent person to offer this piece in the marketplace, cataloging and selling it as part of his February 1947 offering of the Frederick W. Geiss Collection, where he described it as "practically uncirculated with mint luster. Excessively rare; far more so than the cowboy variety." Sometimes maligned for his imaginative marketing, Mehl's take on this coin was correct across the board. Saul Teichman has enumerated 20 of these (perhaps including a couple of duplications). Of those 20, three are impounded in the Smithsonian Institution, the British Museum, and the Bank of California collections. Two have been repaired, and one is bent. PCGS has certified 10 examples, just one of which is Mint State (that lone Mint State coin is also the lone example to receive CAC approval). The last one we offered was graded AU Details, Tooled (PCGS) in June 2014. We haven't offered a straight-graded example since 2006.<p>The reappearance of this coin will whet the appetites of advanced specialists. This unsung rarity appears only when great cabinets are sold. It would make a perfect companion piece for the Baldwin Horseman $10 in the previous lot, just as it has for eight decades in the James A. Stack, Sr. Collection.