The United States Mint in Philadelphia has a rich history dating back to the presidency of George Washington and the days when Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital. The establishment of the U.S. Mint was authorized by the Act of April 2, 1792. The first coins produced at the original Philadelphia Mint were believed to have been made from silver household plates personally provided by President Washington himself.
1st Philadelphia Mint (1792–1833): The first mint was located at Seventh Street and 631 Filbert Street in Philadelphia. David Rittenhouse, an American scientist, was appointed as its first director. The mint had a three-story brick structure that included various functions like deposit and weighing rooms, a press room, official offices, and an assay office. The mint’s basement vaults held gold and silver. Unfortunately, in January 1816, a fire destroyed the smelt and mill houses. Although the mill house was later replaced with a new brick building, operations eventually moved to the second Philadelphia mint in 1833, and the first mint’s property was sold. Sadly, the original mint was demolished between 1907 and 1911, and today, only a small plaque remains to commemorate its location.
2nd Philadelphia Mint (1833–1901): The second mint, designed by William Strickland, was built at Chestnut and Juniper Streets and featured a grand “Grecian Temple” design made of white marble. It improved upon the original facility, but it was constrained by outdated machinery from the first mint. Franklin Peale’s trip to Europe led to the adoption of advanced coinmaking technologies, increasing productivity and quality. However, this mint was sold in 1902 and subsequently demolished.
3rd Philadelphia Mint (1901–1969): The third mint, located at 1700 Spring Garden Street, was designed by William Martin Aiken. It became known for its Roman temple facade and impressive glass mosaics by Louis C. Tiffany, depicting ancient Roman coinmaking methods. This mint remains intact and is now part of the Community College of Philadelphia.
4th and Current Philadelphia Mint (1969–present): The fourth and current Philadelphia Mint, situated two blocks from the original site, was opened in 1969 and designed by architect Vincent G. Kling. This mint is the world’s largest mint as of October 2017 and can produce up to one million coins in 30 minutes. It is responsible for producing coins with the “P” mint mark, except for cents.
Throughout its history, the Philadelphia Mint has played a pivotal role in the production of United States coins and has also been a part of various thefts and controversies, including the famous case of the 1933 double eagle coins.
Philadelphia Mint records
Today, public tours of the Philadelphia Mint are available, providing visitors with insights into the coin production process and showcasing past equipment. The mint has been an integral part of American numismatic history and continues to contribute to the nation’s coinage.
For the nineteenth century, the records of Philadelphia seem to have been preserved the best, but the status of San Francisco is not directly known to me although I do know that some of the 19th century records were consulted in the recent dispute over the Western assayer’s bars. Some Philadelphia records were thrown out in the course of the past century (and were taken home by certain officers who considered them their personal property) but the greatest damage occurred in 1925. We have lists of what was destroyed but this does not make up for the losses.
The Bureau of the Mint (now called simply “The Mint”) has a spotty record when it comes to retention of documents dated after 1873, when it was formed. Large numbers were pitched even in the late 19th century and further batches have been shredded from time to time, especially in 1925,when tens of thousands of pages were summarily disposed of. It is not clear at present what percentage of post-1900 material still exists, though some was sent to the archives in 1947; generally, documents dated after 1938 have not been transferred.
At this point it is only fair to note that some documents ought to be thrown away, as they would simply clog the archival space for generations to come and would never be consulted. For example, does anyone really care that employee X was off on January 23, 1900, because of a common cold? Such information has no bearing on the history of coins or medals struck at the Mints and should be discarded. In similar vein, should we keep the records showing each and every person who purchased mint or proof sets in the past half century? Also, many categories of records simply duplicate other series.
1978: Key Records Destroyed
On the other hand, I learned in 1984 that great quantities of very valuable twentieth-century records had been ordered shredded in 1978 due to some whim from a bureaucrat not understanding or caring what was historically proper to keep. The 1978 order, with many pages of fine print listing the files to be shredded, included the great bulk of Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco letter files, in some ways the most important records then being kept. It is with the letter files that we flesh out the reason for a change in the coinage or the details behind a medal.
The way that I discovered this destruction was odd, in that it had been kept a secret even within the Bureau of the Mint. I had always worked with Mint Historian Eleonora Hayden in getting permission to do research in the documents not yet released to the Archives. In 1984, I was doing research in Washington and had requested the necessary letters of admission to the GSA building in Philadelphia where the Mint records dating after 1900 were stored. Some post-1900 records had actually gone to the archives, but key data, such as the voluminous letter files, were still at the GSA (the General Services Administration center on Wissahickon Avenue).
There was some delay in getting the authorization through Miss Hayden. As she explained to me, each passing year seemed to show that her post was considered less important to the hierarchy. In the 1930s, for example, she had direct access to the director, but by the early 1980s there were three or four layers of officialdom to be passed through if she needed permission from the director for a request such as I had made. She retired, by the way, before the left-handed compliment mentioned above came about.
At any rate the permission was forthcoming and I went to Philadelphia with my trusty tape recorder to go through the letter files. When I got to the area of the GSA building allocated to the records, I should have known something was wrong; several of the employees—or, rather, alleged employees—were talking to each other very loudly while others were listening to portable radios as they walked around the room.
When I asked about the records I was to see, an employee brought out the 1978 destruct lists, perhaps 50 or 100 pages of fine print. A few records had not been destroyed, including the files dealing with coinage done for foreign countries, so the trip was not a complete loss. I had to ask the employees repeatedly, however, to turn down their radios and personal discussions so that I could be heard on my own tape recorder.
Some of the employees at the Philadelphia Mint managed to hide a few of the record volumes from Hackel; after her tenure ended they were brought out of hiding, but only marginally. In one case, when Ernest Keusch & I were working on the Assay Medal book for TAMS, I learned that lists of medals struck after 1924 still existed, in the hands of a senior Philadelphia Mint official. I made arrangements to see the volume but when I arrived at the Mint was told that I could make notes but no xerox copy of any page was permitted! Whether these particular volumes still exist I cannot say.
The destruct order also included many other valuable files, including the die records for the various Mints. Such wanton destruction will surely be felt in the next few decades as information on die varieties is sought in order to combat increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting. We may contrast this strange behavior with that of the Royal Mint in Great Britain, which has furnished rather detailed die information on occasion to qualified individuals.
The curious part about the destruction of the Philadelphia Mint letter files is that the destroyed records were simply continuations of files which were already at the Archives and had been heavily used by researchers. In 1975, I had examined some of the files now destroyed, and copied two or three hundred letters for the years prior to 1914. These copies are now the only reminder of untold thousands of letters now but a memory. This one order has virtually destroyed future research into twentieth century Mint history. As the risk of a very bad pun, I might say that that this proves the old adage that political hacks ought to be kept out of office involving public trust. It was certainly broken in this case by Stella Hackel. Miss Hayden told me that she had looked into the matter and that Mint Director Donna Pope had then reversed Hackel’s “scorched-earth” policy, but it was too late for the earlier records.
The Letter Files of the Mint.
The letter files of the Philadelphia Mint are worthy of a study unto themselves. In the earliest days, the clerks made what today are termed “fair copies” of all letters thought worthy of keeping for future reference. From 1792 to October 1795, however, the directors did not keep copies of their letters—or at least did not leave them at the Mint for future directors to use. It is quite possible that some day we will uncover the Mint letterbooks of David Rittenhouse or Henry William DeSaussure, the first two directors.
Beginning in October 1795, Director Elias Boudinot ordered that a careful record be kept of all letters considered important and quite a few that were only marginally so. We may be thankful that he did, for without this information, we would know but little about the workings of the Mint at this period. These “fair copies”, which are nothing more than letters carefully copied into a bound volume, may be consulted by any researcher.
The following two directors, Robert Patterson and Samuel Moore, were very conscientious about keeping letter files and these are also still in existence. Robert M. Patterson, who became director in 1835, changed the system, however—much to our detriment at this time. Fair copies were no longer made, but instead the director would write out the letter himself and the clerk would recopy it for sending through the mails. What now exists are the director’s own drafts, complete with smudges and crossed-out sections. Patterson, however, had one of the poorer hands of the period and it is sometimes very difficult to understand precisely what he is saying.
Patterson ordered that ledgers be kept showing the rough content of all important letters sent and received, but most of these small volumes were lost over the next several decades and only a few now grace the Archival shelves. It was not until 1853, when James Ross Snowden became director, that record-keeping for letters changed to a new system entirely—that of the letter-press copy. The letter was written out in ink and then a very thin tissue laid across and pressed against the still-wet ink. The ink soaked into the tissue paper, forming a permanent copy. Unfortunately, in some cases the ink tended to run, leaving a blurred copy or, worse yet, the ink contained iron or other acidic chemicals and the tissue paper disintegrated over the years.
Until the late 1860s, the press copy replies were filed with the incoming letters (if there were such), but after that time they were bound into volumes for better storage. Around 1900, the Philadelphia Mint finally began using typewriters and thus switched to carbon paper, the standard until the computer age.
Most of the record groups at the Archives have been inventoried and the researcher uses the printed inventory to determine the type of records wanted. The archives of the various Mints, except San Francisco, as well as that of the Mint Bureau, are in Record Group 104. The original inventory of 1952 has been superseded several times.