19th Century Assayers – Ingot Population

For a quick glance into the relative rarity of a given assayer, we’ve counted and graphed surviving examples of ingots from each assayer and ranked them in order of greatest to least. For the purpose of this graph, we do not consider Assayers from the SSCA (Marchand, etc), and we also do not include ingots associated primarily with presentation pieces which are not directly tied to Assayers since the vast majority of them have one surviving example and are in a class of their own. That being said, we made one exception and included Monumental Mines pieces since there are 4 surviving examples known, most of which are monetized.

It is interesting to see how they stack up against each other, and furthermore how few 19th century gold examples exist! Moffat & Co and F. D. Kohler are well known pioneer assayers who made monetary ingots — all of those are valued at hundreds of thousands each. By observing this chart it becomes increasingly obvious how rare and unique all of these pieces are in their own right and what a privilege it is to see or even own one!