By Greg Johnson from Volume 5, Issue 5 (May 2009) of The E-Gobrecht
I purchased an 1849 quarter in November of 2006 that I was, at the time, unable to attribute using Briggs’ “Comprehensive Encyclopedia of United States Seated Quarters” (Lima, OH 1991 ISBN 1-880731-05-3). A short article by John McCloskey in The Gobrecht Journal (Issue 98, pages 35-36) published the following March described in detail a coin from the same die pairing as the coin in my possession.
During the past two plus years I have examined every 1849 quarter that I could find, whether in auctions, at bourse tables, or on eBay (when photo quality permitted) in an effort to complete the puzzle. I now own four distinct business strike die marriages of the 1849 quarter and though there is not yet a definitive conclusion, I do have what I call a working hypothesis.
I believe that the “unknown” obverse is actually obverse 3 in the Briggs Encyclopedia and that there are a couple of typos in the description that have caused some confusion.
First, the date location of “just right of 5″ is in error and should read “6/7″. Note that date position is determined based on an imaginary line drawn along the right side of the upright portion of the “1″ in the date. The date position number then references where this line intersects the shield above with respect to the shield lines numbered from left to right.
Second, instead of “slopes up left to right” it should read “slopes down left to right.” I’ve noted that the distance measurements from digit to rock provided in the book read 0.5 – 0.5 – 0.5 – 0.6 indicating a downward slope from left to right, though the text says “up”. Figure 1 shows three dates of 1849 seated quarters, the top is obverse 2, the middle is obverse 3 (or the unlisted obverse if the hypothesis is proven wrong), and the bottom is the proof obverse (obverse 4, from the Heritage online archive, Lot 2390, Auction 1104, April 16, 2008).
It should be mentioned here for completeness that obverse 1 has a date that is much further to the left than any of those shown.


Prior to the 14th century, gold was rare in England. Almost no earlier gold coins exist. In the reign of Edward III (1327-77), the next to last Plantagenet King, this all changed. All the silver coinage types continued, with little alteration other than title, as they had been under Edward I and II. A complicated system of privy-marks developed under the first Edward, called “Longshanks” because of his unusual height. A wicked man who waged war in Scotland, he set up numerous mints to issue large amounts of silver coins, and died leaving England a wealthy nation.
In the other fields of numismatics, some of the lesser fakes that we see are so easy to identify that we can do it over the phone with one hand tied behind our backs. For instance, many early U.S. and Confederate banknotes have been widely reproduced in what is commonly called replica form. These replicas are similar to the genuine items, but significantly different in some important way so that the maker cannot be accused of counterfeiting with intent to deceive, an important legal point.
The United States is only one of many countries that over many centuries issued gold composition coins. As the United States expanded so did its need for circulating coinage. In 1848 gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California. People dropped whatever they were doing, sometimes almost literally, and headed for the west coast of what today is the United States to seek their fortunes. Believe it or not even the gold mines in the Carolinas and Georgia in the Appalachian Mountains were abandoned as people perceived that it would be much easier to mine the golden metal in California than in the east.













