The hunt for West Point quarters promotes the hobby of coin collecting with real incentives to search for 2019/2020 “America The Beautiful National Park” W-mint examples often found in pocket change and quarter rolls.
In 2019, the holdering company PCGS stoked collector interest in offering a $5,000 reward for the first Lowell West Point Mint Mark Quarter sent in for grading, promising special labels for those submitting this coin for grading in the first 45 days of the initial discovery.
In April 2019, PCGS wrote: “Two avid coin collectors, one in Kansas and the other in Virginia, have agreed to split the $5,000 bounty offered by Professional Coin Grading Service (www.PCGS.com) for almost simultaneously submitting the first 2019 ‘America the Beautiful’ Lowell National Historical Park quarter-dollars with a West Point mint mark. Both submissions arrived on the same day at PCGS headquarters.”
The West Point Mint, typically used to strike silver dollars, produced 10 2019/2020 W-Mint Mark Quarters with a meager mintage of 2,000,000 for each coin of each year. This is an incredibly low mintage for the Washington Quarter series, with only the 1937-S Quarter with a mintage of 1,652,000 within the same low range.
Moreover, the Mint mixed up the W-mint quarters with ones from Philadelphia and Denver, tempting collectors to find them in pocket change.
Ever since, social media–especially YouTube and TikTok–have hyped the value of these coins in numerous videos. Here’s one of them:
You also will find videos and posts promising hundreds and thousands of dollars for a W-mint quarter. That is for super high grade examples such as MS67+ or even MS68. Again these rank as condition rarities, and only a handful have ever graded at that high level.
Nevertheless, the W-mint quarters have some real hobbyist potential.
Here are retail values for each year:
Keep in mind that these retail values are for PCGS graded coins at MS65. The cost of grading almost always will be as much as the value of the coin. Auction hammer prices are typically two-thirds of the retail values. Also if you find a W-mint quarter in pocket change, technically it is considered circulated. That said, you can find near gem examples distributed mistakenly from rolls or deposited in banks from stores and coin machines.
You will find highly exaggerated “buy now” examples on eBay, like this one with a few bag marks from circulation:
Always check the “sold” button on eBay. If you do, you will find that ungraded 10-coin sets of W-mint mark quarters sell typically for between $150-200.
If you are going to spend time roll and coin hunting, the search for W-mint quarters is worth the time and hobbyist fun.
Finally, if you would like a video version of this article, with more information, see:
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