Q. David Bowers
Historical Prices
Trends and Prices Over the Years
Trade dollars have been a part of hundreds of auction sales, fixed price lists, and dealer advertisements from the 1880s to the present time. A complete listing would be of book length and is beyond the scope of the present study. The following is a representative selection from the material I studied.
Sales with examples of the 1884 and 1885 trade dollars are mentioned specifically in the pages devoted to these two issues (and in any event do not occur before 1908, the year that these two varieties, previously unknown to the numismatic fraternity at large, were publicized). In general, sales containing one or both of these great rarities usually contained other outstanding trade dollars as well.
I reprint catalogue descriptions (in many instances edited and abbreviated to a listing of date, variety, grade, and price) of auction sales and dealer advertisements having trade dollars, to give an indication of price levels. By examining the prices over a long span of years, you can review the source material that I used, in part, in compiling my data. Note that there is no particular consistency among auction prices and advertising data, even for the same year.
Under the individual sections for each trade dollar variety will be found a complete index of average historical prices for each issue. However, by following this time-line of trade dollar offerings and market comments, the development of collector interest in the series will become evident, - as will the emerging interest in rare dates and high grades. I have enjoyed the panorama of prices from lists, auction catalogues, and advertisements, and believe you will also.
The listing below begins with an 1883 auction sale. At the time, there was little numismatic interest in trade dollars, apart from collectors who routinely acquired one of each Proof every year.
There was virtually no interest in business strikes, which even in Mint State, were apt to sell for face value or even less. It was not uncommon for worn trade dollars to sell for in the 60¢ to 80¢ range, even well into the twentieth century!
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was little consistency in pricing, and a given variety in a given grade was apt to sell at widely varying prices in different auctions and listings. There were no such things as standard prices then, any more than there are now (refer to the extremely wide variations in auction realizations cited earlier, from the 1985 Krause guide). One of the great fictions in numismatics today in the 1990s is that, for example, at a given point in time an MS-63 1873-CC trade dollar is worth a specific price.
As to the worth of studying prices from the past, "a page of history is worth a volume of logic,"!
H.G. Sampson's Sale of July 25-26, 1883. Offered were two Proof trade dollars which brought fairly strong prices for the time. At the time, the 1873 was considered by many to be the scarcest and most desirable of the 1873-1883 Proof issues (a prescient observation, for this has been proven true today by research conducted in the 1990s). Curiously, the market levels for Proof trade dollars were higher in the 1880s than they would be two or three decades later!
1873 Proof.$2.00.
1875 Proof. $1.50,
Charles Enders, Jr., New York City, offered these trade dollars for sale in the American Journal of Numismatics, 1886:
1878 Proof. $1.15
1880 Proof. $1.30
Lyman H. Low's sale of the Dr. Henry R. Linderman Collection, June 28, 1887. These two Proof trade dollars were undoubtedly obtained from the Mint when Linderman was director. Not much attention was paid to quality; note that a Proof with a nick sold for more than one which was a "Fine Proof' ("nice" Proof).
1874 Fine, sharp Proof; slight nick on reverse. $1.25.
1874 Fine Proof, sharp. $1.10.
S.H. and Henry Chapman's sale of the Ferguson Haines Collection, October 17.18, 1888, offered a complete set of 1873-1883 Proofs plus a couple of stray mintmarks, Top price honors went to the first year of issue, considered to be the rarest Proof. Of course, in the analysis of such figures today (in the 1990s), researchers do not know-what grade differences, if any, existed among the Proofs offered in early sales. Undoubtedly, some coins were more attractive than others. Catalogue descriptions were brief, and unless a coin had a significant impairment, it was apt to be catalogued simply as "Proof."
In 1888 the Chapman brothers were gaining momentum in the coin business. The pair would soon become supreme on the auction scene, and S. Hudson and Henry would continue to gather laurels after their partnership broke up in 1906. Their skimpy descriptions of trade dollars over the years, and errors in rarity estimates, prove that this denomination was not one of their specialties.
1873 Proof. $2.00.
1874 Proof. $1.50.
1875 Proof. $1.60.
1875-CC VF. $1.25.
1876 Proof. $1.50.
1877 Proof. $1.25.
1878 Proof. $1.38.
1878-S Unc. $1.25.
1879 Proof. $1.25.
1880 Proof. $1.15.
1880 Proof. $1.15.
1881 Proof. $1.35.
1882 Proof. $1.35.
1883 Proof. $1.30.