I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing fewer and fewer Lincoln Memorial Cents in circulation these days. If it’s a game of hide and seek, I’d say the harder I seek, the more these coins seem to be hiding. It’s most certainly more about the natural attrition of a coin that, as I write this in 2026, disappeared from the U.S. Mint production lines about 20 years ago at the end of 2008. Older collectors surely remember similar phenomena with the eventual near-disappearance of the Lincoln Wheat Cent in the decades after the last strikes of those coins rolled out of the Philadelphia and Denver Mints in 1958.
Now, I must add, I’m not suggesting that Lincoln Memorial Cents – produced from 1959 through 2008 – are totally absent from circulation. While they’re technically an obsolete subtype of the Lincoln Cent series, as they’re no longer on the active strike list at the Mint, there are still billions of these coins out there – somewhere. In a typical week of using cash for purchasing goods and services, I’ll still see at least a couple of Lincoln Memorial Cents pop up, which is more than I can say for the Lincoln Wheat Cent, the subtype struck from 1909 through 1958. That coin has been dwindling in circulation since the 1960s and was already rather scarce in circulation by the time I got into the hobby in the early 1990s. Other coins are also seeping away from channels of daily commerce, like pre-1960 Jefferson Nickels and 1776-1976 Bicentennial Quarters.
But the Lincoln Memorial Cent seems to be a different story. Hundreds of billions were made over the course of 50 years. It was a mainstay in U.S. commerce for a half century. I still find it hard to fathom we’re in a time and place where Lincoln Memorial Cents are getting noticeably scarcer and scarcer by the year. Then again, I never thought we’d see the United States actually cease the production of circulating Lincoln Cents, which was something that was bandied about in Congress (and among the general American public) since at least the 1980s. I doubted the end of circulating Lincoln Cents would ever really happen. But, hey, here we are… C’est la vie.
Here we are… Lincoln Memorial Cents are slowly but surely on the way out from daily life. And, for that matter, the time will eventually come when one-cent coins themselves will seem about as anomalous in United States circulation channels as two-cent and three-cent coins. The hands of time never stop turning, do they?
*Opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of PCGS, Collectors, or its subsidiaries.