This is another find from my recent trip to the LCS that I get to a couple of times a year. This is a new round for me and I'm unsure if it's a new mint, or if it's a round from a mint that changed names once incorporated. Either way I was excited to pick up two of these and see what I can find online, but for now it seems to be conflicting information
Collection Highlights -
Tri-State mint appears to either be a mint that was made in the early '80s by Texas territorial which is no longer in business. This of course is coming from the apmex site. Take a look at the screenshot and you can see that this is showing under the Tri-State mint round Lincoln the address bar. I can't seem to find much on the Texas territorialment, but that's likely due to all the false positives of other Texas mints and silver for sale. Its name is to common and probably still in use in too many variations to get a positive result.
Digging a little bit deeper I can find this information on the typical go to the agroundworld.com. under the link for the Tri-State refining that I shared a couple of posts ago. There is ab few details which leads me to believe this could potentially be part of Tri-State refining. The information says that Tri-State refining was reincorporated under the name tri-statement in 1988. They also said that the common eagle and Bell motif was reproduced in 1988 by the tri-statement. This leads me to believe that there's a potential possibility that tri-statement, and Tri-State refining are one in the same and just change their name throughout the course of their business.
If anyone knows for sure I would love to figure out if this is a different Tri-State, and if I need a new source of information.
apmex
Obverse
The obverse is a good looking logo to me. It's very clean with minimal lettering and the image of them pouring their silver. Unfortunately this particular round seems to have quite a bit of fingerprints in the what would otherwise be a mere finish. I think it takes away a little bit from design and it makes it harder to catch the frosting on the letters of TSM and the 14 equipment.
Reverse
Reverse pulls off some great detail. The eagle and the bell both have sharp detail and they look well portioned. It once again goes out to 1776 through 1976 and while it's not an identical to the previous round I showed, does have almost all of the same attributes just in a slightly different variation. This could be could be because they're the same mint that's slightly redesigned the reverse, or a different meant using very similar and common symbolism for the time. Most of the rounds I have showed have either a liberty bell, and or an eagle.
Either way I was glad to add a new vintage round to my stack and to keep it interesting. I was lucky enough to pick up two of these again just in case someone might be looking for a trade down the road.