1917-D Repunched Mintmark WRPM-001

Description

First cataloged repunched mintmark for the 1917 Denver Mint Lincoln Wheat Cent, Wexler designation 1917-D 1¢ WRPM-001 establishes the baseline RPM entry for this World War I-era date. The WRPM-001 sequence number indicates this was the initial repunched mintmark discovery for the 1917-D, though additional RPMs may have been documented subsequently. No other known cross-references exist for this variety, placing it solely within the Wexler attribution framework maintained by John Wexler and his research collaborators. The 1917-D cent was produced during the peak of American involvement in World War I, a period when domestic industrial capacity was being redirected toward military production and the Denver Mint maintained its coinage responsibilities under wartime operating conditions. Mintmark application during this period followed the standard hand-punching procedure: at the Philadelphia Mint facility, a die preparation specialist used a small steel letter punch to impress the D into each working die before shipping it to Denver. When the first punch impression was unsatisfactory — off-center, tilted, or shallow — a corrective second punch created the overlapping images that define a repunched mintmark. The 1917-D cent had a mintage of approximately 55 million pieces, a substantial output that required numerous die pairs and correspondingly numerous individual mintmark punching events, each carrying an independent chance of misalignment. As the first documented RPM for this date, WRPM-001 anchors the variety record and serves as the primary reference point for collectors pursuing early Wheat Cent repunched mintmark varieties from the Wexler Team catalog.

Attribution History

• Discovered by Christopher Ohanian Cross References: None known
• None known; Wexler Variety ID: 1917-D 1¢ WRPM-001
• Expert attribution by Wexler Team

External References