What’s Fresh at the Denver Mint? New Coins, Free Tours

I had never been to the United States Mint in Denver until December 10, when the federal agency running the facility announced that it will release new quarters, dimes and half-dollars as part of its Semiquincentennial Circulating Coin series celebrating the country’s 250th anniversary.

Somehow I missed all the school field trips to 320 West Colfax Avenue while growing up in Aurora, but the Denver Mint was the right place to get in the spirit of the semiquincentennial…even if the word is pasted together to make 2026 feel special. Next year, the mint will mark its 120th anniversary on February 1; Colorado will celebrate its 150th birthday in 2026, too.

What’s on the New Coins?

The new coins don’t have a specific release date besides “early 2026.” They’re the result of a 2021 law signed by President Donald Trump during his last week in office. After returning to office this year, Trump killed the penny, with the final cent coin produced in November, and has lobbied to get his face on a dollar coin.

The new coins will feature seven designs, including five versions of the quarter and one each of the dime and half dollar — but none will feature Trump’s likeness, unlike next year’s National Parks Pass.

The mint’s new half-dollar will picture the Statue of Liberty and her torch, while the dime will show Lady Liberty and a bald eagle. The quarters will display combinations of the pilgrims and the Mayflower, as well as a Continental Army soldier and George Washington (he’ll be on the parks pass, too), Thomas Jefferson and the Liberty Bell, James Madison and Independence Hall, and Abraham Lincoln and two hands grasping.

Touring the Denver Mint

The guided group tours at the Denver Mint are free and only last about an hour, with a guide taking you through a handful of hallways with displays and windows over the floor where coins are made. While walking, you also receive a broad narrative of U.S. history.

At the start of the tour, you’ll see an oil painting of Martha and George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury secretary, inspecting the quality of the nation’s first coins in 1796. At a section about the American Women Quarters Collection, you’ll find bios of Juliette Gordon Low, who founded the Girl Scouts in 1912, and Ida B. Wells, the post-Civil War investigative journalist who covered lynchings and suffragists.

The Mint Has a Police Squad

The U.S. Mint Police wore service caps and button-up wool jackets in the 1920s and 30s, like something you’d see cops wearing in a movie about Al Capone or John Dillinger. A portion of the tour covers multiple attempts to rob the mint, but our guide focused mostly on a former Denver mint employee, Orville Harrington, who in 1920 tried to steal gold hidden in his wooden leg. One of the displays featured the guns U.S. Mint Police have used over the years, like nineteenth-century revolvers and a 1922 Tommy gun.

Scales used to weigh gold from different centuries, each about five feet tall, kept showing up on the tour. One exhibit included a hardened blob of half-melted coins from the eighteenth century. The lobby where everyone waits before the tour starts has displays of money from around world, history about the spice trade and some creative pieces, like a dollar bill folded a hundred times into a glass cube (though the guide noted that the U.S. Mint doesn’t print dollars; that’s job of its sister agency, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing).

The building has some strict rules. Before you enter, two federal officers with the U.S. Mint Police come out to tell you there are “no photos,” and to turn off phones for the duration of the tour. The officer explaining this to my group pointed to the mint, said “that’s the United States,” and then pointed to the ground outside: “And this is Colorado, so no marijuana inside.” I tossed a near-empty THC cartridge I forgot was in my pocket…even though American colonists used hemp as currency.

History of the Mint, Old Opulence

According to our tour guide, Denver’s mint originally opened in 1863 as an assay office, where the quality of precious metals was tested, on Market and 16th streets before moving to its current location on West Colfax Avenue; the building opened as a U.S. Mint in 1906. Since then, Denver has been minting coins for the western U.S., and the tour tries to illustrate how difficult that was before modern machinery and computers, which are now used to precisely design a coin.

The Federal Reserve, a quasi-national banking system, now hosts Kansas City branch offices and the Denver Money Museum near the mint’s former digs on 16th Street. (That museum used to offer free tours until about a month ago, when it stopped indefinitely for no stated reason.) The guide explained to me that while the mint produces the coins, it doesn’t circulate them; the U.S. Mint sells its coins to the Federal Reserve, which circulates them by basically passing them on to banks.

I didn’t get to see coins being made, just metal circles going in and coming out of machines and bins. When I was outside and could turn on my phone, I had to look up the word “numismatics” (the study of collecting coins) because it kept coming up on the tour without anyone defining it. I was surprised to find out that the U.S. Congress-chartered American Numismatics Association has been around since 1891 and operates out of the Money Museum in Colorado Springs.

The tour doesn’t offer much on the history of Denver and its role with the mint, except when you get to the older part of the building at the end. There, you’ll see two impressive, opulent hallways finished in 1904 with chandeliers and marble columns and walls, and early twentieth-century frescos.

The guide did offer a little hope for the penny, however, explaining that the U.S. Treasury ordered the U.S. Mints in Philadelphia and Denver to destroy what materials they had left to make pennies, but left the door open for its return by not specifying that the penny can’t be produced again.

And before I left, I was given an uncirculated, mint-condition penny made in the Denver Mint, making it “the only place where you’ll get free money,” according to our generous guide.

So, would I return? Let’s flip a coin…