1929 ST. GAUDENS $20 MS65

GEM SATIN LUSTROUS SURFACES. A KEY LATE DATE ST. GAUDENS. Beginning with this issue and continuing through the series' end in 1933, every Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle delivery is rare. The Philadelphia Mint struck a fairly respectable total of 1.7 million Double Eagles in 1929. Most of these coins were not needed in export trade, and they were simply placed into federal vaults for storage or found limited distribution within the United States' banking system. In early 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued his now-famous Gold Recall Act in an effort to reverse the economic downturn of the Great Depression. One of the clauses of this act instructed the Mint not to release any more gold coins into circulation and to destroy those pieces that were either still on hand or were returned to federal control as a result of the recall. Numismatic scholars are generally agreed that much of the original mintage for the 1929 Double Eagle was destroyed as a result of this Presidential order. Unlike many other issues in the Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle series, the 1929 has not been widely represented in hoards discovered overseas. A small group of 40 examples was found in England in 1984, and numismatic dealer/author Jeff Garrett purchased another group of 10 coins in the early 1990s from an unspecified source. We are unaware of any other significant finds, so the balance of this issue's extant population probably dribbled into the market either individually or in small groups over the past half century or so.