AUGUST 14
1969•Fourth Philadelphia Mint
2008•Andrew Jackson Presidential $1
The Fourth Philadelphia Mint Is Formally Dedicated
On August 14, 1969, the United States formally dedicated its new Philadelphia Mint at Fifth and Arch Streets, opening the fourth federal Mint facility to serve the city where American coinage began. The massive modern plant replaced the aging third Philadelphia Mint and was built for a radically different monetary age—one of high-speed presses, enormous coin demand, clad coinage, and billions of pieces produced for a growing national economy. President Richard Nixon participated in the dedication, while Mint Director Mary Brooks presided over an institution emerging from the great coin shortage of the 1960s. More than half a century later, the same Philadelphia facility remains one of the most productive coin-making plants in the world.
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Philadelphia: Where the U.S. Mint Began
No American city is more closely tied to the birth of federal coinage than Philadelphia.
Congress established the United States Mint through the Coinage Act of April 2, 1792.
Philadelphia was then the national capital.
The first federal Mint building rose there that same year.
By 1969, the city was preparing to dedicate its fourth major Mint facility.
The United States of 1969 bore little resemblance to the small republic that built the first Mint in 1792.
The population had grown from only a few million people to more than 200 million.
Commerce depended on enormous quantities of small change.
Vending machines, parking meters, public transportation, retail trade, and banks required coins by the billions.
The old Mint could no longer comfortably meet modern needs.
The facility being replaced had opened in 1901 at Spring Garden Street.
It was an impressive building for its era and served the nation through two world wars, the Great Depression, the end of circulating gold coinage, and major changes in silver coinage.
But by the mid-twentieth century, its physical layout and capacity had become increasingly inadequate.
A Coin Shortage Changes Everything
The urgency became unmistakable during the national coin shortage of the 1960s.
Demand for coins surged.
Silver prices rose.
Collectors and speculators removed pieces from circulation.
The Mint struggled to supply enough cents, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half dollars.
The crisis exposed the limits of existing production capacity.
Congress responded with sweeping legislation.
The Coinage Act of 1965 removed silver from the dime and quarter and reduced the silver content of the half dollar.
Copper-nickel clad coinage became the new standard for dimes and quarters.
The law addressed metal supply and monetary economics, but greater manufacturing capacity was also necessary.
The new Philadelphia plant was therefore conceived during a major technological transition.
It was not simply a larger version of the old Mint.
It was a factory designed for the modern era of bonded clad strip, automated handling, high-speed presses, and extraordinary production volume.
The facility represented a fundamental shift in scale.
Construction of the new Mint began in the 1960s.
The location at Fifth and Arch placed it only blocks from Independence Hall and the historic center of Philadelphia.
The choice carried powerful symbolism.
Modern American money would be manufactured near the birthplace of the government that created the federal monetary system.
The new Mint stands near Independence National Historical Park.
Visitors to Philadelphia can move from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell toward a working federal coin factory.
Few places make the relationship between political independence and monetary sovereignty so visible.
The Mint is both industrial plant and civic landmark.
The fourth Philadelphia Mint was formally dedicated on August 14, 1969.
The event marked the official opening of the modern facility.
President Richard Nixon participated in the ceremony.
The dedication connected the new building to nearly two centuries of federal coinage history in Philadelphia.
Richard Nixon
Nixon had taken office only months earlier, in January 1969.
His presidency would later be associated with another major monetary transformation: the end of the dollar's convertibility into gold for foreign monetary authorities in 1971.
Thus the new Mint opened just before the final collapse of the postwar Bretton Woods gold-exchange system.
Mary T. Brooks served as Director of the Mint during the dedication.
Appointed in 1969, she became one of the most influential modern Mint directors.
Her tenure included the Eisenhower dollar, the Bicentennial coinage program, major collector initiatives, and the continued modernization of Mint operations.
The new Philadelphia facility became a central platform for that work.
Brooks was not the first woman to direct the United States Mint, but she continued a remarkable institutional pattern.
Nellie Tayloe Ross had become the first female Mint Director in 1933.
Eva Adams followed decades later.
Brooks took office during another period of profound monetary change.
Her leadership is inseparable from the early history of the fourth Philadelphia Mint.
The new Mint was designed to produce coins at a scale unimaginable to its predecessors.
Modern presses could strike hundreds of coins per minute.
Multiple production lines could operate simultaneously.
Automated systems moved planchets and finished coins through the plant.
Billions of pieces could be manufactured annually.
The first Philadelphia Mint had been closer to a specialized workshop.
Workers operated screw presses and performed many tasks manually.
By 1969, coinage had become heavy industry.
Rolls of metal, blanking presses, annealing furnaces, upsetting mills, high-speed coining presses, inspection systems, and bulk handling equipment formed an integrated manufacturing process.
Coin production begins long before the final strike.
Metal strip must be prepared to precise thickness.
Blanks are punched from the strip.
They are softened through annealing, cleaned, and passed through upsetting mills to form raised rims.
Only then are the prepared planchets ready for the coining press.
The Strike
Inside the press, obverse and reverse dies strike the planchet under enormous pressure while a collar controls its diameter and edge.
The operation happens at high speed.
Finished coins are inspected, counted, bagged or otherwise packaged, and shipped into the banking system.
The fourth Philadelphia Mint was designed around this industrial rhythm.
For much of American history, coins struck in Philadelphia carried no mintmark.
Philadelphia was the original Mint, so no identifying letter was considered necessary.
That convention changed gradually.
During World War II, Philadelphia nickels temporarily carried a large P mintmark as part of the wartime silver-alloy series.
In 1979, the Philadelphia Mint used a P mintmark on the Susan B. Anthony dollar.
Beginning in 1980, the P appeared on most Philadelphia-struck denominations other than the cent.
The modern facility dedicated in 1969 therefore witnessed the transformation of Philadelphia from the “unmarked” Mint into one routinely identified by its own letter.
Philadelphia cents normally continue to carry no mintmark.
A famous exception occurred in 2017, when the Mint placed a P on Philadelphia cents to commemorate its 225th anniversary.
The mark was removed again in 2018.
That brief experiment connected modern cents directly to the institution founded in 1792.
Only a few years after the new Mint opened, the United States introduced the Eisenhower dollar.
The large coin debuted in 1971.
Philadelphia struck copper-nickel clad examples for circulation.
The denomination tested the new facility's ability to produce a large modern dollar in significant quantities.
The fourth Philadelphia Mint also participated in one of the largest commemorative-style circulating coin programs in U.S. history.
For the nation's Bicentennial, the quarter, half dollar, and dollar received special reverse designs and the dual date 1776–1976.
Massive production ensured that the designs reached Americans nationwide.
The modern plant helped turn a national anniversary into everyday pocket change.
The Susan B. Anthony Dollar
In 1979, the Mint introduced a smaller dollar featuring Susan B. Anthony.
It was the first circulating U.S. coin to portray a real historical woman as its principal subject.
The Philadelphia facility produced enormous numbers during the initial launch.
The coin failed to achieve broad circulation, but its historical importance remains substantial.
Beginning in 1999, the 50 State Quarters Program generated extraordinary public interest in coin collecting.
Philadelphia became one of the two principal production centers for the circulating quarters.
Billions of P-mint state quarters entered commerce.
The program demonstrated how the high-volume plant could support a rapidly changing series of designs.
The America the Beautiful Quarters Program followed from 2010 through 2021.
Again, Philadelphia struck vast numbers of circulating coins with changing reverse designs.
The ability to manage frequent die changes while maintaining enormous output is a hallmark of modern Mint production.
The fourth Philadelphia facility was built for precisely that kind of scale.
Beginning in 2022, the American Women Quarters Program brought another rapid sequence of new designs.
Philadelphia remained a central production facility.
The program honors women whose achievements shaped American history.
Each year's multiple reverses demonstrate how far coin manufacturing has evolved since the first Mint's hand-operated presses.
The Philadelphia Mint also produces medals and numismatic products.
Its engraving and medallic traditions connect it to the earliest federal Mint.
Although West Point and San Francisco play major roles in modern collector coinage, Philadelphia remains a vital artistic and production center.
The facility's responsibilities extend far beyond filling bank orders.
Modern coin design begins with artists and sculptors.
Digital tools now supplement traditional sculptural methods.
Master tooling and working dies must be produced with extraordinary precision.
Philadelphia has long been central to that technical-artistic process.
The fourth Mint inherited an engraving tradition reaching back to Robert Scot, the first Chief Engraver.
The contrast with 1792 is extraordinary.
The first Mint occupied a modest group of buildings on Seventh Street.
Its early employees struggled with limited equipment, metal supplies, and bonding requirements.
Production was tiny by modern standards.
Yet that institution established the federal coinage system the fourth Mint inherited.
The Second Philadelphia Mint
In 1833, operations moved into a larger Greek Revival building at Juniper and Chestnut Streets.
The second Mint coincided with the introduction of steam power and major nineteenth-century coinage reforms.
Christian Gobrecht's Seated Liberty designs emerged during this period.
The institution was already evolving from craft production toward mechanized manufacturing.
The third Mint opened in 1901 on Spring Garden Street.
Its grand architecture reflected the importance of federal coinage at the height of the industrial age.
Saint-Gaudens Double Eagles, Lincoln cents, Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, Standing Liberty quarters, and Walking Liberty half dollars all passed through its production floors.
By the 1960s, however, the building itself had become the bottleneck.
The 1969 facility broke decisively with the monumental architectural style of its predecessor.
Function dominated.
The building was designed as a modern industrial plant capable of handling huge volumes of coinage.
Its appearance reflected the reality of twentieth-century minting: this was a factory first.
The Philadelphia Mint became one of the few places where the public could observe modern coin production directly.
Visitor galleries allow people to watch operations from above.
For many Americans, the experience provides their first understanding that ordinary pocket change passes through a complex industrial process.
Coins become tangible manufactured objects rather than abstract money.
The Philadelphia facility has often been described among the world's largest coin-producing plants.
Its output can reach billions of coins in a year.
That scale is necessary because even tiny changes in national demand translate into enormous quantities.
A country of hundreds of millions of people consumes coins on an industrial scale.
The Mint and the Federal Reserve
The United States Mint manufactures circulating coins, but it does not decide retail demand store by store.
Coins move into circulation through the Federal Reserve system.
Federal Reserve Banks order coins based on banking-system demand.
The Mint must then adjust production to meet those orders.
The 1960s shortage showed what happens when supply and demand fall badly out of balance.
The new Mint opened after silver had disappeared from dimes and quarters but before the United States completely abandoned the old gold-linked international monetary system.
Within two years, Nixon would suspend dollar convertibility into gold for foreign official holders.
The modern Philadelphia Mint therefore opened during the final transition from older precious-metal monetary traditions toward today's fiat and clad-coin system.
For most of U.S. history, the value of major coins had been closely tied to their gold or silver content.
By 1969, circulating American coinage had entered a different world.
Dimes and quarters were copper-nickel clad.
Half dollars contained reduced silver, and even that would soon disappear from normal circulation strikes.
The new Mint was built for fiduciary coinage.
That combination gives the fourth Philadelphia Mint its special character.
Inside, high-speed machinery produces modern coins by the millions.
Outside, the building stands amid landmarks of the eighteenth-century republic.
The physical setting compresses nearly the entire history of American government and money into a few city blocks.
The formal dedication of the fourth Philadelphia Mint was more than the opening of another federal building.
It marked the modernization of an institution founded alongside the Republic itself.
The new plant answered the production crises of the 1960s and prepared the Mint for the enormous coin demands of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
From Eisenhower dollars and Bicentennial quarters to State Quarters and today's circulating coinage, much of modern American numismatic history has passed through the facility dedicated on August 14, 1969.
The first Philadelphia Mint helped establish the nation's monetary independence.
The fourth made that system industrial.
More than fifty years later, it is still making America's coins.
Also on This Day: August 14, 2008
On August 14, 2008, the United States Mint released the Andrew Jackson Presidential $1 Coin into circulation, making Jackson the seventh president honored in the Presidential $1 Coin Program.
The obverse portrait was designed by Artistic Infusion Program Master Designer Joel Iskowitz and sculpted by United States Mint Sculptor-Engraver Jim Licaretz.
Like the other Presidential dollars of the original program, the coin paired the presidential portrait with Don Everhart's Statue of Liberty reverse and carried identifying inscriptions on the edge.
The Jackson dollar remains the master calendar's secondary “Also on This Day” event and is not promoted over the 1969 dedication of the fourth Philadelphia Mint.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
2008 — Andrew Jackson Presidential $1 — Andrew Jackson dollar was introduced as the seventh Presidential $1 coin.