Foreword

           Although I have read many scattered accounts of activities of the  Philadelphia Mint in the 1790s and early 1800s, many questions remained unanswered. I have found traditional sources to vary  in their reliability.    Frank Stewart's 1924 book, History of the First United Sates Mint, Its People and Its Operations, is very good, but leaves the reader wishing that more had been said.  Don Taxay's magnum opus, U.S. Mint and Coinage, 1966, was considered by many to be the definitive source on the title subject, until researchers began reading it carefully, finding many errors of fact, probably  from assumptions  furnished by Walter Breen, the major outside contributor to the book. Still,  it  remains  very   useful.  The  Taxay   work was   written  in  a quarter century of misinformation, from 1950 to about 1975,  when Breen reigned as the undisputed icon in American numismatic research.  While quite a few other students of mints  and minting  found  problems  here and there with some of Walter's writings, the full extent of his errors  was not  known  until later, when the present marvelous era of numismatic research took hold.  A half dozen or more scholars entered the field, one of whom was Karl Moulton.  Located in Congress, Arizona, Karl and his wife  Jenny are well know as dealers in out-of-print numismatic   literature,  most  importantly the  auction  catalogs  issued  by  many  different  firms  from  the  mid-19th century down to the present day.

          The new methodology employed by Moulton and several others, quite unlike that used by Breen, has been to evaluate source material, add modern commentary, a few opinions (strictly identified as such),  and   generate information that readers  will find to be quite useful.  One of my favorite  thoughts is that 1 coin plus1 book or reference source about that coin will equal not 2, but 3 units of numismatic enjoyment.