“One of the favorite medals for me is this medal, because from Queen Elizabeth’s time, it celebrates the victory over the Spanish armada,” says Money Museum curator and numismatic enthusiast, Douglas Mudd, proudly surveying a large, stylized coin dated 1588.
American Numismatic Association
For most, a national coin shortage is the first (and perhaps the only) time they will be interested in coinage. But here in Colorado Springs, the American Numismatic Association has made the city a coin collecting hub since the 1960s.
“In fact…because of the museum being here, it kind of puts us as one of the leaders in numismatics,” says George Mountford, president of the Colorado Springs Numismatic Society.
The Numismatic Society is not to be confused with the Colorado Springs Coin Club or even the American Numismatic Association (both of which are also in the city), clarifies Mountford.
Money Museum – a Numismatic Dream
While several major American cities boast large coin clubs to celebrate coin collecting, he says, it is the ANA’s Money Museum that puts the Springs on the numismatic map. “We do an awful lot here though because of that museum,” he says.
“We use coins and paper money and metals to tell the story of how people lived…throughout history,”says Mudd, curator of the ANA’s Money Museum.
Mudd left the Smithsonian Museum’s numismatic collection to curate the Springs’ Edward C. Rochette Money Museum, which boasts a collection of around 270,000 items—the third largest in the country.
The museum’s contents include paper money, coinage and “traditional” money (objects used in lieu of currency) from historical periods from Ancient Greece to post-World War I Germany.
George Cruikshank’s Satirical Note
It includes such rare pieces as a satirical note made by activist George Cruikshank. The 1818 note responded to Britain’s harsh sentencing of forgers at a time when poorly made one-pound notes and illiteracy combined to place forged notes into the hands of unknowing citizens throughout the kingdom. The punishments? Transportation to Australia or, in hundreds of cases, execution.
Cruikshank later wrote of the satirical pound note, which depicts Britannia eating her children next to a gallows supported by the bank of England, “I consider it the most important design and etching that I ever made in my life….” Visitors can see it in the museum today.
Even within a sterling collection, the museum’s Harry W. Bass Jr. Gallery is a numismatic treasure. According to its website, Bass, “created one of the most complete U.S. gold coin collections ever assembled,” including a display of pattern coins—rare, rejected prototypes of 1800s coin designs—as well as the only complete collection of $3 coins extant, all found in a rotunda within the museum.
Is there a coin shortage?
Can all this numismatic history make sense of the 2020 coin shortage? Mountford points out that the COVID-19 crisis temporarily slowed coin production in the three United States mints (in Denver, San Francisco and Philadelphia), where COVID restrictions forced those mints to scale back production and slow their constant contribution to the American coinage supply.
Coin shortages are no historical rarity. According to numismatic historian Q. David Bowers, who lives in New Hampshire, the biggest American coin shortage happened within living memory: in the mid-1960s.
At the time, the value of silver found in coins, like quarters and dimes, passed the currency value, leading Americans to hoard silver coins—taking them out of circulation almost overnight.
A circulation problem may be a piece of today’s coin shortage puzzle. “Trust me, there’s plenty of coin out there. It’s just not making its way to the right places,” says Coinstar CEO Jim Gaherity. Homebound shoppers opt to purchase everything from clothes to groceries online, keeping coins out of cash registers across the country.
Historian Bowers urges caution in referring to the current situation as a coin shortage, claiming, “The nation has never really run short of coins to where you couldn’t get any.” Instead, he wagers that the Federal Reserve is already taking steps to ramp up coin production—and it is, having planned to pour an estimated 1.35 billion coins into the economy each month for the rest of 2020, an increase of about 350 million per month than usual.
But as the Federal Reserve rushes to supply American cash registers and wallet-bound coins return to circulation, numismatists both amateur and avid can visit Colorado Springs’ Edward C. Rochette Money Museum to learn about the volatile, valuable history of coinage and coin collecting.
Says Mudd, “I love doing this kind of job.”
