1885-S $1, PL MS(PCGS#7165)

June 2026 Showcase Auction U.S. Coins

Auctioneer

Stack's Bowers

Lot Number

2183

Grade

MS65PL

Price

9,150

Lot Description

This is one of our finest offerings for a Prooflike 1885-S Morgan dollar in recent memory. It is a brilliant and beautiful Gem with frosty motifs contrasted against reflective fields. The strike is full, the surfaces expectably smooth at the assigned grade level.<p>The 1885-S is among the scarcer San Francisco Mint Morgan dollars in Mint State, a mintage of 1,497,000 coins not overly generous by the standards of this series. It is particularly challenging to locate with a fully prooflike finish for, as Wayne Miller observes in his <em>Morgan and Peace Dollar Textbook</em>, "The 1885-S, when prooflike, is frequently so on one side only, usually the reverse....Many lustrous semi-prooflike pieces are sold as prooflikes." Miller wrote in an era prior to the advent of third party certification by PCGS and NGC, which has separated the true prooflike examples from semi-prooflike or one-sided PL pretenders. The offered coin is solidly in the former category, and it is one of the true Gem prooflike examples that Miller asserts are "worth a substantial premium." Rare.