Can you believe it’s been more than 35 years since the first of the great General Services Administration sales of silver dollars began in 1972? Of course, if you’re younger than 50 or so, then you probably know of the sales only through reading about them.

For me and the thousands of other bidders in the sales, it was the chance of a lifetime, although we didn’t realize it at the time. We were taking part in one of the signal events in the history of coin collecting in America – the dispersal of one of the greatest hoards of all time.

Technically, it was merely the continuation of the hoard’s dispersal, as the Treasury had been doling out its massive stockpile of silver dollars to interested parties for years before the GSA sales. However, in the early 1960s, this depletion accelerated enormously.

According to Leroy Van Allen and A. George Mallis’s Comprehensive Catalogue and Encyclopedia of U.S. Morgan and Peace Silver Dollars, “The Treasury holdings of silver dollars in Washington, D.C. dwindled from 180 million in January 1960 to 28 million on January 1, 1964.” Rumors of older Morgan dollars being released in addition to the more common Peace type resulted in a further run on the Treasury, which responded by calling a halt to sales on March 26, 1964. Read Full Article

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