Lot 1669
The Finest Known 1833 Quarter Eagle. NGC graded MS-67. This coin is graced by full mint bloom glowing from the fields. The strike is above average, with only slight weakness on the stars' central points and a touch at the center of the shield and right wing tip. What makes this coin so powerful is the resplendent fields, devices and rims. They show no signs of contact, no bagmarks, handling marks, fritzies or follies to distract the examining eye. We can not imagine a finer coin of the type, where the total number of gems can be held in your hand, and to find a superb gem like this is a remarkable twist of fate. A foremost rarity in this grade and a phenomenal opportunity.
According to the NGC and PCGS Population Reports, this is the only coin so graded, with none graded better. In point of fact, it is nearly impossible to find in choice Mint State. Yet this amazing coin is just splendid, so it was obviously set aside virtually the day it was issued and carefully preserved during all the intervening years (166 of them)--and those included periods of panic and depression, several disastrous wars including two that involved the whole western world, and even the gold recall of the FDR years. And remember, these were the days of Andy Jackson, our seventh president and a war hero when wars were fought by hand, not by mandate. The West was the Ohio River Valley--all the lands beyond being almost unknown, just a place of wild Indians and swarms of millions upon millions of buffalo, and unknown promise. Down in the republic of Texas, the Alamo battle was still three years away. The South was mostly a sleepy backwater of cotton plantations and bound Negroes who harvested its crops by hand and sore back. And in the East, which was still decades away from being a mighty land of industry, but where commerce was growing all the time, the horse-drawn streetcar was in its second year of operation. In a word, this 1833 gold piece, with its charming design, is a nearly perfect symbol of these times, full of the promises of democracy yet still in their infancy. It's also, to be practical, one of the very few ways anybody can "touch" the America of those days.
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