DENVER — Somewhere between your couch cushions or the cupholders of your car, in a piggy bank or a wishing well or on the sidewalk of any street, there’s a penny or a nickel or a dime or a quarter with an inconspicuous “D” beside the head of a president.
That’s “D” for Denver. Specifically, for the Denver Mint.
And somewhere inside the white, ornate block of a building in the heart of the Mile High City, there’s a charming, retired teacher-turned-tour guide cracking his usual line.
“Now,” Joe Blackman says to his 14 guests, “we’re going to show you where the government makes cents.”
Welcome to one of the land’s six U.S. Mint facilities, for more than a century manufacturing the change that makes the national economy go around. Others have specific, Congress-approved duties in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Fort Knox, Ky., and West Point, N.Y. But only two make circulating coins: Philadelphia provides for populations east of the Mississippi River, while Denver delivers for those west.
The two Mints are itinerary stops for tourists. They come with an obvious curiosity, one that might’ve been sparked amid the coin shortage of the pandemic, and one that might be somehow poignant in this age of digital commerce, when the coin seems all too fated for those dark spaces of couches and crummy curbs.
“People want to see how their money is made,” Blackman says. “It’s exciting for them.”
The technology has changed since the first silver and gold coins were struck here in 1906 along Colfax Avenue. But the process is much the same. On tours, people watch as man and machine work.
Massive metal sheets are fed into blanking presses that punch the shape of coins — “kind of like giant cookie cutters,” Blackman says during the tour. The blanks, he says, are bound for a furnace heated to 1,700 degrees. That softens the material for proper ridging around the edges and stamping of heads and tails.
“We can do 750 coins per minute,” Blackman says. “We make 25 to 30 million of them every day.”
As it’s been for 100-plus years here in Denver, coins exit a hole to the lower counting and bagging room. One of those bags might weigh more than 2,000 pounds en route to Federal Reserve banks in the region.
The circulating money represents but one mission of the Denver Mint.
The tightly guarded plant also serves as protector of national assets in the form of 1,370 tons of gold. That amounts to about 182 full-grown elephants and 17.5% of the precious metal kept by the government, some of it drawn during Colorado’s first great rushes.
And beyond the circulating ones, the Denver Mint produces commemorative, uncirculated coins to serve one of America’s oldest pastimes.
Collectors look no further than the gift shop for some of the day’s must-haves. That includes the latest of the coveted American Eagle series, depicting Lady Liberty and the iconic bird (going for about $2,600 here). That includes also the latest in celebrating baseball’s Negro National League (three coins for $762).
In showing the life cycle of oak imprinted on platinum, another new series recognizes freedoms we hold dearest: religion, speech, press, assembly and petition.
And another recent craze are the quarters honoring pioneer women of America. In the first year of the five-year series, the Denver Mint is stamping on the poet and activist Maya Angelou; the first woman in space, Sally Ride; a Cherokee Nation leader, Wilma Mankiller; a suffrage leader in New Mexico, Nina Otero-Warren; and Anna May Wong, an early Chinese star in Hollywood.
“There’s a lot of people who really don’t know much about these women,” says Randy Johnson, Denver Mint’s supervisor. “Women have really been underappreciated in America, so we’re playing catch-up.”
And this, he says, speaks to the greater aim of U.S. Mint. The coins of yesteryear and today are designed to represent American heritage and ideals through people, places and events.
“Like history in your pocket,” says public affairs specialist Tom Fesing.
As the agency’s director, Ventris Gibson, puts it in the 2022 collector’s guide: “Since arriving at the United States Mint last fall, I’ve seen firsthand how sincerely my colleagues take their commitment to connecting America through coins.”
Johnson arrived at Denver Mint 25 years ago. He says more than 200 engineers, machinists and inspectors work on the ground floor, and many are like him. “Unless they’re new, they’ve been here a long time,” he says.
It’s a matter of pride, Johnson says. “When you work for the Mint,” he says, “you feel like you’re part of the history of America.”
It’s indeed a history about as old as the country.
Alexander Hamilton was tasked with preparing a monetary system not long after the Constitution was ratified. The U.S. Mint was established under the 1792 Coinage Act, paving the way for the facility in Philadelphia.
San Francisco came later, in 1854. This was the decade that saw tens of thousands of fortune-seekers flock to the rugged, untamed territory that would be Colorado.
Gold dust and flakes from mountain streams would be an early form of currency.
“Miners would literally go into the bars of Denver with their bags of gold dust,” author and historian Kimberly Field says in a PBS documentary on the city’s Mint. “Having fat fingers was a job requirement for a good bartender, because he would dip his fingers into the miner’s bag and take a little pinch of gold dust.”
That would be weighed on countertop scales all around. In this emerging town still isolated from the broader economic system, some bankers from Kansas saw an opportunity. They erected a brick building on a corner of 16th Street near a muddy, stinky stockyard. At Clark, Gruber and Co., gold powder could be assayed and made into coins.
“Abraham Lincoln and his secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase at the time, found out that a private bank in the Wild West town of Denver was making its own money. They weren’t too pleased,” Fesing says in the documentary. “So how do you a stop a business? You buy them.”
The federal government took over in 1862. The assaying continued, but it would take three decades for the U.S. Mint to establish itself there.
And it would take more years into the next century for a headquarters matching ambitions to make Denver the “Washington of the West.” The marble and granite building on Colfax was modeled after a palace in Florence, Italy. It was complete with Romanesque arches and paintings and the finest chandeliers, copper and brass.
It was, Field says, “one of the things that made Denver a real city.”
It remains a head-turner today, inspiring questions.
“A question we get here all the time: How do we pay the bills?” Blackman says on the tour.
A good question, especially considering Mint hubs are expected to be self-funded enterprises while selling coins at face value.
“The penny costs about 2½ cents to make, and we sell it for 1. The nickel costs over 8 cents to make, we sell it for 5,” Blackman says. “The dime costs 4 cents to make, we sell it for 10. The quarter’s about 9 cents to make, we sell it for 25.”
And then, of course, there’s revenue from the collectibles. Last year, Denver Mint reportedly returned $120 million in net profit to the U.S. Treasury’s General Fund.
“Another question we get here all the time: Has the Mint ever been robbed, broken into, or held up?” Blackman continues. “The answer is no. But we have had some employee thefts.”
Most notorious was Orville Harrington, who’s pictured at the Mint today, his devilish gaze trained on the production floor. Over several months in 1920, he smuggled gold bars worth more than $8 million in today’s value. He was sentenced to 10 years at Leavenworth Penitentiary.
Harrington was a peg-legged man cursed by the same blessing and curse of men across time and civilization.
At the Denver Mint, tourists start in an exhibit displaying ancient money. Turquoise of the Egyptian pharos. Jade of the Aztecs. A boar tusk used in New Guinea and shells used in Asia. Bronze lepton issued by Pontius Pilate of Judea.
It all recalls something the Denver Mint’s boss, Johnson, has wondered:
“I think about the coins that people find and collect from the Roman Empire, and I think about the coins made here, and I wonder what people will be looking at 1,000 years from now, 2,000 years from now. And I can’t help but wonder if people will know about Denver, Colorado, if nothing else because there’s that ‘D’ on the coin.”
———
If you go
Free tours at Denver Mint run at various times from 8 a.m.to 2 p.m. Monday-Thursday, but officials warn demand is high and space is "extremely limited."
Instructions on requesting tours and more information at: https://bit.ly/3BGdLgm
———
