Antique Coin Silver

Coin silver is a 19th-century American term referring to silver goblets, bowls, trays, and flatware containing roughly 900 parts silver and 100 parts copper. While the term has its roots in the silver content found in British and Spanish coins of that period, most objects that were made out of coin silver were not made exclusively from melted coins, although that certainly did occur. Instead, an object stamped "Coin" or "Pure Coin" or "C" was simply understood to contain roughly 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper, regardless of the source of the component metals. The exact percentage of silver in coin-silver objects, especially those made from coins, varied quite a bit. Coins minted in the United States after the Revolutionary War only contained 892 parts per 1,000 of silver. The silver content in U.S. coins was increased to 900 in 1837, and in 1869, the United States embraced the British sterling standard of .925. That gave further definition to the coin standard of .900, which was made official in 1906 after the passage of the National Stamping Act.