The government considered minting new coins to replenish its stockpile, but this idea was met with stiff resistance. Word of this discovery circulated widely, and both banks and the Treasury Department freely paid out the coins until they were mostly gone in early 1964. When a sealed bank vault was opened in 1962 at the Philadelphia Mint, hundreds of thousands of Morgan and Peace dollars were found, including some scarce issues. The Peace dollar was the last silver dollars minted, and regular production of the dollar coin ended after 1935.įrom the nation’s immense silver dollar stockpile, $1,000 bags of the coin were paid out to banks, which then paid the dollars out to customers or held onto them as monetary reserves. To replenish the Treasury’s silver dollar stockpile, that same quantity of silver was purchased from American mines and struck into new dollars starting in 1921. Within three years, Treasury Department vaults were filled with unwanted coins.ĭuring World War I, America came to the aid of Great Britain by converting more than 270 million silver dollars into bullion, which it sold for $1 per fine ounce.

In the late 1870s, Congress sought to reintroduce the silver dollar by ordering the United States Mint to strike millions of coins each year. The reasons were basic: the coins were too large, too heavy, and, in time, paper money proved to be the public’s preferred means of exchange. However, the reality was somewhat different, and though used in foreign trade, silver dollars generally did not actively circulate in the United States. Similar in size and composition to Spanish and Mexican dollars, the denomination should have been the ideal unit of commerce.

The American silver dollar was first authorized by the Mint Act of April 2, 1792, where the denomination was intended to be the standard unit of the American monetary system.

The American Silver Dollar Never Had Much Currency as a Circulating Coin Some are worth a few dollars, others are worth thousands. Eisenhower Dollars were struck for circulation from 1971 to 1978.

Eisenhower 1972 dollar coin value