C mint mark

How to read it

North Carolina had the country’s first gold rush, and in 1835 Congress set up branch mints in Charlotte, Dahlonega and New Orleans. The Mint says Charlotte and Dahlonega concentrated on turning miners’ gold into coins. The Charlotte Mint opened in 1837 and struck its first coins in 1838; CoinWeek says it was authorised to strike only gold. The Levine Museum of the New South lists its coins as $1, $2.50 and $5 gold pieces, all struck with a C, and says 89% of the gold came from North Carolina. On the $5 piece the C is under the eagle.

Also searched as: Charlotte mint mark, C on a coin.

C or CC

A single C is Charlotte; a CC is Carson City in Nevada. The metal and the date separate them: Charlotte struck only gold, from 1838 to 1861, and Carson City struck silver and gold from 1870 to 1893.

What Charlotte struck

CoinWeek counts 20 dates of quarter eagles ($2.50) and 23 of half eagles ($5), from 1838 to 1860 and 1861, and eight dates of gold dollars between 1849 and 1859.

After 1861

The Confederacy seized the building in 1861, and the Levine Museum says some $5 coins were struck under Confederate supervision. The Mint says Charlotte reopened only briefly in the 1870s, as an assay office. The building was moved to Randolph Road and opened in 1936 as the Mint Museum of Art, North Carolina’s first art museum (Levine Museum).