Wheat Reverse Design Last Utilized in 1958
Not every great coin can be a great rarity. Sometimes a classic design or something else just makes a coin special, even though the coin is not of any great value. The 1958 Lincoln cent may be such a coin. It represents an end of an era.
The 1958 Lincoln cent was, at the time of its release, considered rather common. As youngsters collecting coins, we certainly did not spend a great deal of time lingering over those first 1958 Lincolns. There were far more important coins to chase.
Although it was a more quiet time, things were pretty exciting when it came to coin collecting. There were lots of great coins in circulation. None of which happened to be 1958 or – especially – 1958-D Lincoln cents.
If you check back on mintage figures, you will find that Philadelphia produced a total of 253,400,652 1958 Lincoln cents. That mintage was, for the time, fairly routine. It was not all that large. In 1956 and 1957, Denver had topped the 1 billion mark. Nor was it all that small. In 1955, San Francisco had produced just over 44.5 million cents, so realistically it was kind of an average production.
The 1958 Denver Lincoln cent production was, without a doubt, on the high side. The 800,953,300 figure was under the 1 billion mark, but not by all that much, as Lincoln cents go. In fact, only a few times in the history of the Lincoln cent had that figure ever been topped up to that point in time.
In either case, to a youngster back in 1958, the 1958 Lincoln cent was not special. It was readily available if you happened to want one. That was it.
As it turned out, however, the 1958 Lincoln cent was the last in the line of wheat stalk reverse Lincoln cents. In 1959, after 50 years of service, the design was changed. It was just a change on the reverse. No one was about to remove Lincoln from the obverse, but replacing the wheat stalks with the Lincoln Memorial was a way to mark a half century of use. It was something of a perfect political compromise.
At the time, the design change was considered exciting. Perhaps not as exciting as watching the first satellites pass overhead in the night sky, but pretty exciting anyway. For many young collectors it was the first design change they had ever experienced.
There is little doubt that the 1958 Lincoln cent was kind of lost in the shuffle. Fortunately, based on supplies today, there were at least some who, for one reason or another, decided to save a roll of those new 1958 cents. While the 1958 Lincoln cent may not be terribly valuable today, it is still a nice coin to have around as the last of its design type.
Every coin in a collection does not have to have great investment potential, spectacular eye appeal or great rarity. In fact, a collection is perhaps a little less of a collection and more of an investment portfolio if it does not have a few coins that are there simply because they are interesting to have around and they are needed to form a complete set.
The 1958 fits that description. It was the last of a design, a product of a vastly different time. It may well be that a 1958 cent will never be especially valuable, but that misses the point. In its own simple way, the 1958 Lincoln cent represents a lost America that some of us fondly remember. We were younger then and newly embarked on a great hobby adventure that continues to this day.