1910 Lincoln Wheat Cent - RCD-1c-1910-01R Retained Cud

Description

Opening the retained cud catalog for one of the earliest Lincoln cent dates, the RCD-1c-1910-01R was documented on October 13, 2023, as the first retained cud variety for the 1910 Lincoln wheat cent — the second year of Victor David Brenner's iconic design that debuted in 1909 to commemorate the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. A retained cud forms when a portion of the die rim develops a through-fracture and the broken segment comes free but is kept in place, creating a raised and slightly offset zone on struck coins that keeps the design within the affected area. Philadelphia struck approximately 146.8 million cents in 1910, a production run that built upon the first year's experience with Brenner's design and established the long production routines that would characterize wheat cent manufacturing for the next five decades. The 01R designation establishes this as the initial retained cud entry for the 1910 date, and its relatively recent catalog date of 2023 indicates this variety escaped documentation for over a century before being identified and submitted to the Cuds on Coins database. This extended latency between striking and cataloging is not unusual for die varieties on common-date wheat cents, where the population of surviving coins is large and variety researchers continue to make new discoveries from long-circulated specimens. No cross-references from other attribution services have been established. Early-date wheat cents from 1909-1920 tend to have fewer documented cud and retained cud varieties than the high-mintage dates of the 1940s and 1950s, partly because lower mintages produced fewer die failures and partly because heavy circulation wear on surviving specimens can hide the subtle diagnostics of retained cud formations.

Cross References

• Cross reference: none. 10/13/2023.

External References