1900 Barber Quarter

1900 Barber quarters are considerably common and are usually pursued by both type set coin collectors and those who are assembling a complete set of Barber quarters by date and mintmark. While most 1900 quarters in a grade of full Good or better are collected by numismatists, sub-Good, cleaned, and damaged examples are commonly shuffled into silver bullion investors’ portfolios.

Here’s a breakdown of 1900 Barber quarters in terms of their mintages and approximate values:

• 1900 – 10,016,000; $13

• 1900-O – 3,416,000; $21

• 1900-S – 1,858,585; $17

• 1900 proof – 912; $850

*Values are for coins in a grade of Good-4, unless otherwise noted.

The Philadelphia Barber quarter from that year received the highest mintage and remains the most readily available example of that date. The 1900-O, which actually had a higher mintage than the issue from San Francisco, is more valuable in Good than its Bay Area counterpart.

This can be attributed to fewer quarters from New Orleans being saved than S-mint pieces. Which clearly illustrates why mintage figures mean relatively little sometimes – population, not mintage, determines how many coins actually remain today, and in the case of century-plus-old silver coins, the real number of survivors is often a fraction of their original mintages.