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San Francisco Mint – Boomtown Born and BredThe San Francisco Mint and the explosive growth of the surrounding community were both consequences of the California Gold Rush of 1849. Yet it wasn’t until 1854 that the San Francisco Mint was opened.Boomtown by the BayAnyone who has lived in California, particularly in the built up areas of Southern California, or the Bay Area in the north, will have experienced changes brought about by economic growth. Real estate prices and the overall cost of living are pressed upward, above national averages, by a nearly continuous inflow of people over the years.This has been going on at least since gold was discovered in 1848. In that year California became The Golden State. As would-be prospectors poured in from around the world, San Francisco bloomed from an insignificant outpost into a burgeoning boomtown of prodigious proportion (as W.C. Fields, or his later incarnation, Spiro Agnew, might have phrased it). No place for the "nattering nabobs of negativity", this was a boiling cauldron of optimism and energy! And the prices (of everything) went up, Up, and UP! But there was, as it happened… One Foggy Little Cloud…Paying for your goods and services with odd little nuggets and random pinches of gold dust was… imprecise. And somehow, the inaccuracy always worked against the buyer.Clearly... gold in a standard size and shape, of known weight and purity, from a source with unimpeachable credibility, provided in useable denominations, and in sufficient quantities... would make life easier, leveling the field for buyer and seller. So… they set up the San Francisco Mint, made up some coins, and all lived happily ever after… Right? Well, not right away. Ingots – Any Size Will Do!Getting away from nuggets and dust, the first stop on the way to marketplace liquidity was the production of ingots – blocks of gold, made from whatever gold one had on hand.If there was exactly $10.00 worth of gold in your pouch (unlikely), you could have it melted down and cast into a $10.00 ingot – marked with that value, along with its purity (for example, 884/1000, i.e., 884 parts of 1000 is pure gold.) Or, more likely, if your gold dust amounted to, say, $23.45 in value, the ingot delivered to you would be of that unique value, and stamped accordingly. This service was rendered by private assayers who, recognizing the value and need for their services, set up shop in San Francisco. The fee charged for assaying gold and reformatting it into a handy ingot was either tacked on at the end, or deducted from the gold originally provided in the transaction -- reflected in the value stamped upon the finished ingot. So then… assayed gold in ingots of known weight and purity saved the day? No, but it was a step in the right direction. The next step added “standard size and shape” to the recipe. Making Money by Making CoinsUnless one had hung around earlier gold strikes back East – in North Carolina or Georgia – gold coins were not a familiar part of life. Local assayers, seeing an opportunity to further improve the prevailing means of exchange, set up private mints in conjunction with their private assay offices.Privately minted gold coins were made in standard denominations… $5, $10, $20 dollar coins for the most part. Depending on the company, more or less effort was expended to create coins in the image and likeness of their Federal counterparts produced by the US Mints in the East. By and by, people learned which mints were operated honestly, and which were not. The credibility of private minters was always suspect, but as time went on it became clear that one company produced coinage you could take to the bank without penalty – Moffat & Co. As many private minters foundered on the poor reputations they earned, Moffat & Co prospered. In 1850 the Federal Government asked the company to assume role of a United States Assay Office. This was readily accepted by Moffat. Augustus Humbert was appointed Chief Assayer. But There Was Still a Problem…The Treasury Department allowed the new US Assay Office to strike only one denomination – a fifty-dollar coin – broad and thick – a real slug. And that’s what they were called: Slugs. It is said that putting three of these in a sock made an effective weapon. All you had to do was “slug” him who would purloin your poke.In every other context these golden gear wheels were highly inconvenient. After a brief flurry of on-again-off-again decrees, Acting Secretary of the Treasury William L. Hodge ruled against production of smaller gold denominations. Why? Because the $50 coins were big and ingot-like. The smaller denominations would be like... coins. So? Well… Assay Offices make ingots, and Mints make coins. And the thing they had going in San Francisco was an Assay Office, not a San Francisco Mint, which needed Congressional authorization. Time for a Mint?A San Francisco Mint?Why yes, thank you.As the Federal wheels began to turn toward opening a real US Mint, the US Assay Office was deemed the logical place to start. This facility was successfully remodeled to produce coins in convenient sizes and sufficient quantities -- as the long awaited San Francisco Mint. The mint opened on April 3, 1854. On April 15th the first coins were struck – double eagles -- $20 gold pieces with a large “S” mint mark on the reverse side – similar to the one at the top of this page. So began the San Francisco Mint -- and a significant chapter in American numismatic history.
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