NOVEMBER 5
1874•San Francisco’s “Granite Lady” Mint Completed
2024•Limited Edition Silver Proof Set Released
San Francisco’s “Granite Lady” Mint Is Completed and Turned Over
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On November 5, 1874, the completed second United States Mint building in San Francisco was turned over to Superintendent A. H. LaGrange. Designed by Treasury Supervising Architect Alfred B. Mullett and built at Fifth and Mission Streets, the massive Classical Revival structure was created to handle the enormous flow of gold and silver coming from the American West. Decades later, after surviving the catastrophic 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, it would become famous as the “Granite Lady.”
The building’s completion represented far more than a change of address for the San Francisco Mint. The original facility, opened in 1854 during the California Gold Rush, had become inadequate for the scale of western precious-metal production. The new Mint was a federal statement that San Francisco and the mineral wealth of the Pacific Coast had become central to the nation’s monetary system.
Its story would eventually encompass Gold Rush coinage, Comstock silver, the 1906 disaster, emergency banking, decades of coin production, abandonment, preservation, restoration, museum use, and even a pair of United States commemorative coins issued in its honor.
Why San Francisco Needed a Mint
The discovery of gold in California in 1848 transformed the economy of the American West. Enormous quantities of raw gold poured from mining districts, but converting that metal into standardized federal coinage presented a logistical problem. Shipping bullion thousands of miles to an eastern mint was expensive, slow, and dangerous.
Congress responded in 1852 by authorizing a branch of the United States Mint in California. San Francisco was selected as the location, and the first San Francisco Mint opened on April 3, 1854.
The new facility gave miners and merchants a federal institution where gold could be deposited, assayed, refined, and converted into trusted United States coins. In its first year alone, according to the U.S. Mint, it produced more than $4 million in gold coinage.
Its “S” mintmark became a permanent part of American numismatics. The Mint notes that the San Francisco “S” is the oldest mintmark still in use today.
The First Building Was Quickly Outgrown
The original Mint operated from a relatively small structure on Commercial Street. It had been adapted from an existing building rather than designed from the beginning for the extraordinary industrial demands that soon confronted it.
California gold continued to flow. Then another great source of western precious metal emerged: Nevada’s Comstock Lode.
The Comstock, discovered in 1859, became one of the richest silver deposits in American history. Its output placed additional pressure on federal minting and refining facilities in the West. The San Francisco Mint needed more room, stronger vaults, better machinery, and a building capable of handling precious metals on a national scale.
The federal government therefore committed to an entirely new structure.
The government acquired land at Fifth and Mission Streets in 1867 for $100,000 in gold coin. Construction began April 1, 1869, and the cornerstone was laid in May 1870.
The project would take years and cost more than $2.1 million by the time the building was completed in November 1874.
The architect was Alfred B. Mullett, Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department. Mullett was responsible for a number of important federal buildings and worked in several monumental architectural styles. For the San Francisco Mint he produced a powerful Classical Revival design dominated by a monumental portico and columns.
The U.S. Mint later called the structure one of the finest examples of Federal classical revival architecture and described it as Mullett’s masterpiece in that style.
The second San Francisco Mint was not intended to disappear into the commercial streetscape. It was designed as a monument to federal authority and financial stability.
Its exterior evoked ancient classical architecture. Massive masonry, monumental columns, heavy walls, iron shutters, secure vaults, and a commanding facade gave the building the visual language of permanence.
That symbolism mattered in a city whose explosive Gold Rush growth had occurred only a generation earlier. A monumental federal mint told Californians that the Pacific Coast was no longer a distant frontier economy. It had become integral to the financial machinery of the United States.
The National Park Service later emphasized this national significance, noting that the building represented the westward expansion of the country and federal recognition of the economic importance of the Pacific slope.
November 5, 1874
The U.S. Mint’s official historical timeline records the milestone precisely: on November 5, 1874, the completed San Francisco Mint, designed by Alfred B. Mullett, was turned over to Superintendent A. H. LaGrange.
Contemporary historical accounts likewise record November 5 as the formal delivery of the new building to the superintendent.
The event marked the transition from years of planning and construction to federal control of a completed minting facility. The Mint moved from its cramped original quarters into a building capable of handling the extraordinary precious-metal economy of the West.
The new structure was the second building to house San Francisco’s United States Mint operations. A third—and current—Mint building would eventually open in 1937.
The new San Francisco facility quickly assumed enormous importance. National Park Service documentation states that the Mint took rank among the principal minting facilities in the country and served as a federal depot for western gold and silver.
Its location was ideal. California remained a major gold-producing region, while silver from Nevada moved through San Francisco’s financial system. The building’s receiving rooms, refining operations, machinery, vaults, and coin presses stood at the intersection of mining and national money.
Millions of coins carrying the “S” mintmark emerged from San Francisco during the decades the Granite Lady operated as a mint.
Today, many of those coins are among the most avidly collected issues in American numismatics. Morgan dollars, Liberty Head gold, Barber coinage, early twentieth-century gold, and numerous other denominations connect directly to San Francisco’s role as a western mint.
Gold from California, Silver from Nevada
The economic geography behind the Mint is essential to understanding why the building became so important.
The California Gold Rush had created the need for a San Francisco branch mint in the first place. But by the 1870s, the West’s precious-metal story had expanded beyond California gold.
Nevada’s Comstock Lode generated enormous quantities of silver and helped reshape western banking, transportation, mining technology, and politics. San Francisco became a major financial center for mining wealth.
The Granite Lady was therefore not simply a “Gold Rush Mint.” It belonged to a broader era in which western gold and silver fed the United States monetary system.
Mint Director Mary Brooks later recalled how gold from California’s Mother Lode poured into the building’s receiving rooms and how silver from the Comstock and Nevada followed.
The event that made the building legendary occurred more than thirty years after its completion.
At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a devastating earthquake struck San Francisco. Buildings collapsed, gas lines ruptured, and fires spread through the city. The fires ultimately caused much of the destruction for which the disaster is remembered.
The Mint survived the earthquake with relatively limited structural damage. But survival of the shaking was only the beginning. Fire approached the building, threatening both the structure and the enormous government treasure stored inside.
Mint employees and soldiers fought to save it.
According to later U.S. Mint accounts, about fifty employees were at the facility when the earthquake struck, and they were joined by soldiers in the effort to defend the building.
Iron shutters helped protect lower-floor openings. Workers used hose, pumps, and water from the Mint’s artesian well to fight flames as fires consumed surrounding blocks.
The battle was intensely personal. Some employees fought to save the Mint even while their own homes were burning elsewhere in the city.
The building’s massive construction and the determination of its defenders succeeded. When much of the surrounding district lay in ruins, the Mint remained standing.
That survival cemented the “Granite Lady” in San Francisco memory. U.S. Mint historians note that the nickname may have existed before the earthquake, but the events of 1906 unquestionably made it appropriate.
A Treasury in a Ruined City
The Mint’s survival mattered for more than architecture.
With banks and financial institutions disrupted by the disaster, the building was able to serve emergency financial functions. The U.S. Mint describes it as the only financial institution capable of operating immediately after the earthquake and fire.
Its vaults protected government gold. Its facilities assisted disaster relief. Its water supply helped people in the surrounding area.
Mary Brooks later described the building as functioning as a bank, message center, source of water, and repository of treasure during the emergency.
Thus a structure built to transform western precious metal into federal money became, in a moment of civic catastrophe, part of San Francisco’s survival infrastructure.
The earthquake occurred in the middle of a coin-production year, creating an extraordinary historical connection between 1906-S coins and the disaster.
The Mint temporarily stopped production because its gas works were damaged. After repairs, coinage resumed.
Collectors today can hold San Francisco coins dated 1906 and connect them directly to the year employees defended the Mint against the fire.
That connection helped inspire the 2006 San Francisco Old Mint commemorative program, which marked the centennial of the earthquake and honored the building’s role in the city’s recovery.
By the twentieth century, even the Granite Lady could no longer meet all of San Francisco’s minting needs.
A new Mint facility was constructed and opened in 1937. Coin production shifted to the third San Francisco Mint building, leaving the Fifth and Mission structure to become the “Old Mint.”
The old building continued in federal use for years but eventually faced an uncertain future. By the late 1960s it was considered surplus property and was threatened with loss or demolition.
Preservationists and public officials fought to save it.
Its historical importance had already received national recognition. The Old Mint was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961, reflecting both its architecture and its role in western expansion and federal monetary history.
Restoration in the 1970s
In 1972, the federal government transferred the building back to the Treasury Department for restoration by the Bureau of the Mint.
Mint Director Mary Brooks became one of the most important advocates for the project. Restoration sought not merely to stabilize the structure but to return historic spaces to useful public and governmental service.
The basement and first floor opened as a museum in the 1970s. Exhibits included gold, historic artifacts, and material explaining the building’s role in the Gold Rush, coin production, and the 1906 disaster.
At a 1976 ceremony marking the completed restoration, Brooks paid tribute to the building’s century of service and to the workers who had saved it from the fires.
For visitors in the 1970s, one of the Old Mint’s most dramatic attractions was a “Million Dollar Gold Display.”
The U.S. Mint announced the exhibit in 1974 as part of the building’s centennial celebration. It included 71 bars of .999-fine gold weighing more than a ton, together with a major gold-nugget collection.
At the official government gold price of $42.22 per ounce, the bars were valued at a little over $1 million. The Mint noted that their open-market value was far higher.
The display returned the visual spectacle of precious metal to a building originally constructed to receive, refine, store, and coin the mineral wealth of the West.
In 2006, the United States Mint honored the Old San Francisco Mint with its own commemorative coin program.
Congress authorized a $5 gold coin and a silver dollar to mark the centennial of the 1906 earthquake and recognize the Old Mint’s importance to California and the nation.
The $5 gold coin’s obverse depicted the Old Mint based on Mullett’s original architectural rendering. Its reverse adapted the eagle design from the 1906 Liberty Head half eagle.
The silver dollar’s obverse also portrayed the Old Mint, while its reverse featured a replica of the reverse of an 1904 Morgan dollar eagle motif associated with San Francisco coinage.
Surcharges were directed toward rehabilitation of the historic building for museum use.
It was a fitting transformation: the building created to manufacture coins had itself become the subject of United States coins.
The San Francisco Mint’s Continuing Legacy
The modern San Francisco Mint operates at a different location, but the “S” mintmark continues to connect present-day collectors with the city’s long minting history.
San Francisco is now especially associated with proof coinage and numismatic products. Since 1968, the facility has played a central role in producing proof coins for collectors.
The history stretches backward through the current Mint, the Granite Lady, and the original Gold Rush facility.
Few American cities have such a rich physical record of federal coin production. The three locations collectively tell a story of changing technology, changing monetary needs, and the transformation of the West.
November 5, 1874 marks the completion and formal turnover of a building that became one of the great landmarks of United States Mint history.
The Granite Lady was built because the first San Francisco Mint could no longer handle the scale of western precious-metal production. It received California gold and Nevada silver, produced vast quantities of federal coinage, and symbolized the economic integration of the Pacific Coast into the United States.
Then history tested the building in a way its designers could never fully have anticipated.
In 1906, when earthquake and fire devastated San Francisco, Mint employees defended it while much of the surrounding city burned. Its vaults and massive walls protected federal treasure. Its well supplied water. Its continued operation supported relief and recovery.
The building later survived obsolescence, closure, and threats to its existence. It was designated a National Historic Landmark, restored, opened to the public, and eventually honored on commemorative United States coins.
All of that history traces back to the completed structure placed in the hands of Superintendent A. H. LaGrange on November 5, 1874.
The government had built a mint.
San Francisco eventually gave it a name: the Granite Lady.
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