The US three-cent piece was a coin produced in two different versions: the silver-cent piece (1851–1873) and the nickel three-cent piece (1865–1889). The silver version was introduced to facilitate the purchase of postage stamps, which had gone down in price from 5 cents to 3 cents, while the nickel version was introduced to replace the silver version and address coin shortages due to silver hoarding during the civil war.
This 1866 is nickel three-cent piece is from the second year this coin was minted, with a mintage of 4,801,000 coins. There were over 11 million of the 1865 coin minted!
Over the 24 year run of this coin the mintage numbers were low.
These were all minted in Philadelphia.
While reading up on this coin for this post I learned something interesting. In 1942 the US Mint floated the idea of minting a glass three-cent coin, as all the metal resources were being used for yet another war 🎉
