My Favorite Coin: 1864 ‘L’ Indian Cent
My favorite coin for this column is an 1864 L Indian cent that I got in trade for some writing work that I did at the end of November 1998. As you can see, the NGC-certified cent is in MS-64 RB (red brown) condition. The NGC guide says it’s worth $1,325, which is considerably more than the value it had when I got it. At that time, the coin was listed in the dealer’s inventory for $495. I’ll have more to say about the dealer and the work I did later in this column. The first U.S. cents were quite large, and by the end of their run in 1857, they were unpopular with the public. In addition, they were becoming too costly to produce. The solution to these difficulties was to make the cent smaller.
Officially, the first of the small cents began in 1857, with a design by James B. Longacre. Longacre’s design for the first small cents featured a flying eagle on the obverse and the words “ONE CENT” on the reverse, almost completely surrounded by a wreath. The planchets on which they were struck consisted of 88 percent copper and 12 percent nickel. Appropriately, they’re called copper-nickel cents. Of course, it’s well known that a rather large contingent of Flying Eagle (FE) cents was minted in 1856 and carried that year’s date. These were pattern coins to show what the design would look like, and they were widely dispersed. Because of the relatively large number of 1856 FE cents produced, they’re often collected as part of the run of small cents along with Indian cents.
Estimated mintages of the 1856 FE cents vary widely. For example, the 2024 Red Book ( Guide Book of United States Coins) notes, “It is believed that between 2,000 and 3,000 pieces were struck in all.” By contrast, in Flying Eagle & Indian Cents, Richard Snow cites 1,050 proof varieties and 500 non-proofs.
The first Longacre-designed Indian Head cents appeared in 1859, which, because its wreath differs from that on later Indian cents, is a one-year type coin. The year 1864 brought the last of the copper nickels and the first of the bronze Indian cents, minted on planchets of 95 percent copper and 5 percent tin and zinc. There were two varieties of the 1864 bronze cents: those without the designer’s initial and those with the “L” initial. Of the 39,233,714 total mintage, Snow estimated 34 million without the initial and 5 million with the initial. This mintage differential means that the cent with the initial is more valuable than the one without it. According to a recent issue of Numismatic News, the 1864 without the L lists for $25 in F-12, whereas the 1864 L in the same grade is worth $110. In MS-65, the two coins list for $750 and $2,750, respectively.
As a mail-order dealer for a decade, I had a couple of interesting experiences with the 1864 L cent. The more profitable of these experiences involved a coin dealer in England that I bought a few coins from. From him, I ordered an 1864 listed and priced as the non“L” variety. As you can guess, the coin he sent had an “L.” At the time, there wasn’t all that much difference in the two coins’ values, so I don’t know if the dealer didn’t know about the two varieties or didn’t care.
My other experience involved an 1864 L I ordered from a dealer in Oregon. The coin on his wholesale list was a high- grade, circulated 1864 L that he described as being dark. This was long before purchasers were able to see pictures of coins before buying them by mail. The price was low, so I took a chance and ordered it.
As it turned out, the coin was so dark that a better description would have been that it was black! When it didn’t sell after a few times on my mailing list, I decided to see if some cleaning would improve its looks. I don’t remember what I used
(baking soda paste?), but cleaning took away most of the black. And the L went with it!
Fortunately, the 1864 L has another defining characteristic, which you can use to identify it even if you’ve inadvertently removed the designer’s initial. The bust of the Indian (which is really a version of Liberty in a Native American headdress) is pointed rather than rounded.
As I wrote at the beginning, I received the 1864 L in exchange for some coin writing I did. I was employed by David Lawrence Feigenbaum to write brief introductory sketches for different coin series such as Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes and Walking Liberty half dollars. Feigenbaum was the founder of David Lawrence Rare Coins, a thriving business in Virginia Beach, Va. Unfortunately, David had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS. ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease after the famous baseball player who succumbed to the disease. In England, ALS is known as motor neurone disease (MND), which is more descriptive of the pathology responsible for the loss of motor control of different parts of the body. I often mentioned ALS when I taught biological psychology.
At any rate, I was delighted to do the writing work for David and his son, John Feigenbaum, who took over DLRC when his father died. John is now the CEO and President of the Coin Dealer Newsletter (Greysheet).
After I had done the sketches, I told either David or John that instead of a monetary payment, I would like to take my payment in a coin from their inventory. They were OK with this, and that’s how I got the 1864 L cent.
David had compiled the stories of some people with ALS and published this in 1998 as “Journeys With ALS.” Part of the blurb on Amazon reads: “Living in the shadow of ALS (textbook prognosis: three to five years) is a harsh journey down a road they didn’t expect to take. In this book you will find 33 of these first-person journeys. Some are hopeful, some sad. A few are angry. All are powerful, real-life examples of people doing their best to cope, often with humor and high spirits.”
Planning to review the book in my Basics and Beyond Column, I read it from cover to cover. With a tendency toward hypochondriasis, I soon became aware that I had at least one of the symptoms of ALS, muscle twitches called fasciculations. Of course, the more I concentrated on the symptoms, the worse they seemed to get, and I became convinced that I had ALS.
To make a long story short, I eventually found myself being tested for the disorder by the state’s expert in the disease. The testing involved needles in my legs and electric shocks, which is just as unpleasant as it sounds.
I was so relieved to find that I didn’t have ALS, that my wife and I left the medical facility and bought a new car, our most expensive one to that date. It turned out to be one of the worst cars we had ever owned, but that’s another story.
And now you know why the 1864 L Indian cent is one of my favorite coins.