1852 Braided Hair Coronet Head Cent - Braided Hair Large Cent Newcomb-6 Obverse Rim Cud

Description

An obverse rim cud on the 1852 Braided Hair large cent die marriage Newcomb-6 records a die failure where part of the obverse die's rim gutter was lost between the 3 o'clock and 4 o'clock positions. On the finished coin it appears as a raised interruption in the design rim that tracks the rim's course. Christian Gobrecht's Braided Hair design — featuring Liberty with her hair gathered in a braid and bound with a coronet inscribed LIBERTY — served as the final iteration of the large cent obverse from 1839 through the denomination's end in 1857. The Newcomb reference system, developed by Howard R. Newcomb in his 1944 work "United States Copper Cents 1816-1857," assigned die marriage numbers to each documented combination of obverse and reverse dies, with N-6 identifying a specific pairing for the 1852 date. Philadelphia struck approximately 5.06 million large cents in 1852, producing them on the large 27.5mm copper planchets that had defined the denomination since 1793. The 3-to-4 o'clock position places the cud in the right quadrant of the obverse, potentially near stars in that region or the adjacent field area. Collectors can identify this variety by the distinctive raised interruption in the rim at the described clock position, requiring no magnification for the cud itself though a loupe helps confirm the N-6 die marriage through other die characteristics.

Cross References

• Newcomb N-6