A collection of 1794 cents reflects much of the story of one of the most pioneering and romantic struggles in American history. In the little Mint building on Seventh Street in Philadelphia, during the middle of the last decade of the eighteenth century, history seems to almost have held her breath for a time, and we find the marks of her desperately clenched teeth engraved deeply in the soft copper pennies of those years.
—Dr. William H. Sheldon in Early American Cents