1890-P VAM-3

Description

Discovered by George Mallis in July 1964 — one of the co-founders of the VAM classification system itself — the 1890-P VAM-3 Morgan Dollar carries the revised designation "Doubled 1, Near Date" with the classification III2 3 - C3a and die pairing number 191. The obverse die (type III2 3) displays doubling on the numeral 1 of the date, manifesting as a short spike below the upper crossbar of the digit, along with the date positioned further left than the normal placement. The "Near Date" component of the attribution refers to this leftward shift, which brings the date closer to the rim denticles than the standard positioning — a variation in date punch placement that occurred when die sinkers manually positioned the individual date numerals into working dies. George Mallis's personal discovery of this variety in 1964 — years before the publication of the first comprehensive VAM reference — places it among the earliest documented Morgan Dollar varieties in the system he co-created with Leroy Van Allen. The 1890-P had a mintage of approximately 16.8 million Morgan Dollars, and the Philadelphia Mint's production during this period involved manual die preparation techniques that naturally produced variations in date and mint mark positioning. The doubled 1 provides a mechanically distinct attribution point — the doubling of the numeral indicates that the date punch was applied at least twice with a slight positional shift, leaving a ghost image that appears as the characteristic spike beneath the crossbar. This variety exemplifies the founding generation of VAM research, when the discoverers of the classification system themselves were identifying the varieties that would populate their groundbreaking reference work.

External References