Details of Treasury’s Mint Lab Foggy
While authenticating a Kennedy half dollar mint error coin last week, I had an experience that made me recall an old movie that I watched as a child called “Brigadoon.” The movie took place in the Scottish Highlands where two American hunters, lost in a dense fog, stumbled upon a little village of locals as they crossed over a small stone bridge. Long story short, the village was only visible one day a year every hundred years when the fog cleared, and then at day’s end it disappeared from view again in a fog.
The Mint Lab in Washington, D.C., is my “Brigadoon.” I cannot find anyone now working at the Treasury Department who has ever heard of it. One person I spoke with said she would get back to me but never did. When I called her again a few weeks later, I was told there was no such place! Perhaps that’s due to a name change or relocation to another state, which I find hard to believe. You see, that’s because I’ve been there. When the American Numismatic Association’s authentication service was still in Washington, we used the lab as consultants because the Mint technicians working there were the final authority on true minting errors and wildly unusual error pieces that could only be made for “sport.” Now I’m told the place no longer exists.
In the 1970s, collecting error coins was in its infancy. At the authentication service, we used reference books for error coins written by Arnie Margolis and Alan Herbert that were in Charles Hoskins’s personal library. After several months, when the director of the service decided to promote me to a rookie authenticator, he arranged a trip for us to the Philadelphia Mint, where he worked previously. He wanted me to see all the steps involved in making our coins. As I recall, back then, everything was still done in the building. I even got to see the rolling mills where ingots of metal were flattened down to the thickness of each coin denomination. Thankfully, they were not in operation on that day. Learning how our vintage coins were made by watching the process from their design to the finished product helped me to understand how each error coin could possibly happen.
The engraving department was the most interesting for me. There was a closet filled with old coin dies covered with grease ( to protect them) on shelves and lots of interesting things to look at on the engravers’ benches and kept hidden in their desk drawers.