It’s Christmas morning in 1953. Under the tree, I spy one of the gifts I’ve been asking for: a partial set of Indian cents in a Whitman 25c blue folder. It’s the kind of 3-page folder with holes for each of the dates from 1856-1909. The 1856 hole has a cardboard plug in it with the word RARE on it. None of the early holes has a coin in it, of course, and all the filled holes are for 20th century coins, with maybe a few earlier dates in the 1890s. The backing paper in each hole had a series of vertical stripes of a slightly different hue. The stripes were glue to hold a coin in the hole if its wear had made it too small for a tight fit. You probably have seen well-circulated cents with vertical stripes on their reverses that were once housed in the cheap Whitman blue folders. I didn’t know what the stripes were for when I was a kid, and I don’t recall ever licking them to hold a loose coin down. I might’ve used tape across the coin instead!
In this article, I’m going to tell you about a brief, but very important U.S. series, the first small cents. Specifically, I’m going to talk about the cents from 1856 to 1864 minted in a copper-nickel alloy, hence the name copper-nickel cents.
By the end of the run of large cents, the Mint had encountered a problem that’s back to
