Manufacturing money at the Denver Mint
DENVER — Somewhere between your couch cushions or the cupholders of your car, there’s a penny or a nickel or a dime or a quarter with an inconspicuous “D” beside the head of a president.
That’s “D” for Denver. Specifically, for the Denver Mint.
And somewhere inside the white, ornate block of a building in the heart of the Mile High City, there’s a charming, retired teacher turned tour guide cracking his usual line.
“Now,” Joe Blackman says to his 14 guests, “we’re going to show you where the government makes cents.”
Welcome to one of the land’s six U.S. Mint facilities, for more than a century manufacturing the change that makes the national economy go around.
Others have specific duties in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Fort Knox, Kentucky, and West Point, New York. But only two make circulating coins: Philadelphia provides for populations east of the Mississippi River, while Denver delivers for those west.
The two Mints are itinerary stops for tourists. They come with an obvious curiosity, one that might’ve been sparked amid the coin shortage of the pandemic, and one that might be somehow poignant in this age of digital commerce, when the coin seems all too fated for those dark couch spaces.
“People want to see how their money is made,” Blackman says. “It’s exciting for them.”
The technology has changed since the first silver and gold coins were struck here in 1906. But the process is much the same.
Massive metal sheets are fed into blanking presses that punch the shape of coins — “kind of like giant cookie cutters,” Blackman says. The blanks, he says, are bound for a furnace heated to 1,700 degrees. That softens the material for proper ridging around the edges and stamping of heads and tails.
“We can do 750 coins per minute,” Blackman says. Coins exit a hole to the lower counting and bagging room. One of those bags might weigh more than 2,000 pounds en route to Federal Reserve banks in the region.
The circulating money represents but one mission of the Denver Mint.
The tightly guarded plant also serves as protector of national assets in the form of 1,370 tons of gold. That amounts to about 182 fullgrown elephants and 17.5% of the precious metal kept by the government, some of it drawn during Colorado’s first great rushes.
And beyond the circulating ones, the Denver Mint produces commemorative, uncirculated coins to serve one of America’s oldest pastimes.
Collectors look no further than the gift shop for some of the day’s must-haves. That includes the latest of the American Eagle series, depicting Lady Liberty and the iconic bird (going for about $2,600 here). That includes also the latest in celebrating baseball’s Negro National League (three coins for $762).
And another recent craze are the quarters honoring pioneer women of America. In the first year of the five-year series, the Denver Mint is stamping on the poet and activist Maya Angelou; the first woman in space, Sally Ride; a Cherokee Nation leader, Wilma Mankiller; a suffrage leader in New Mexico, Nina Otero-Warren; and Anna May Wong, an early Chinese Hollywood star.
“There’s a lot of people who really don’t know much about these women,” says Randy Johnson, Denver Mint’s supervisor. “Women have really been underappreciated in America, so we’re playing catch-up.”
And this, he says, speaks to the greater aim of U.S. Mint. The coins of yesteryear and today are designed to represent American heritage and ideals through people, places and events.
As the agency’s director, Ventris Gibson, puts
it in the 2022 collector’s guide: “Since arriving at the United States Mint last fall, I’ve seen firsthand how sincerely my colleagues take their commitment to connecting America through coins.”
Johnson arrived at Denver Mint 25 years ago. He says more than 200 engineers, machinists and inspectors work on the ground floor.
It’s a matter of pride, Johnson says. “When you work for the Mint,” he says, “you feel like you’re part of the history of America.”
It’s indeed a history about as old as the country.
Alexander Hamilton was tasked with preparing a monetary system not long after the Constitution was ratified. The U.S. Mint was established under the 1792 Coinage Act, paving the way for the facility in Philadelphia.
San Francisco came later, in 1854. This was the decade that saw tens
of thousands of fortuneseekers flock to the rugged, untamed territory that would be Colorado.
Gold flakes from mountain streams would be an early form of currency.
“Miners would literally go into the bars of Denver with their bags of gold dust,” author and historian Kimberly Field says in a PBS documentary on the city’s Mint.
“Having fat fingers was a job requirement for a good bartender, because he would dip his fingers into the miner’s bag and take a little pinch of gold dust.”
That would be weighed on countertop scales. In this emerging town still isolated from the broader economic system, some bankers from Kansas saw an opportunity. They erected a brick building near a muddy, stinky stockyard. At Clark, Gruber and Co., gold powder could be assayed and made into coins.
“Abraham Lincoln and his secretary of the treasury ... found out that a private bank in the Wild West town of Denver was making its own money. They weren’t too pleased,” public affairs specialist Tom Fesing says in the documentary. “So how do you a stop a business? You buy them.”
The federal government took over in 1862. The assaying continued, but it would take three decades for the U.S. Mint to establish itself there.
And it would take more years into the next century for a headquarters matching ambitions to make Denver the “Washington of the West.” The marble and granite building was modeled after a palace in Florence, Italy. It was complete with Romanesque arches and paintings and the finest chandeliers, copper and brass.
It was, Field says, “one of the things that made Denver a real city.”