On October 10, President Jimmy Carter signed into law legislation authorizing the production of a new smaller dollar coin measuring 26.5mm and weighing 8.1 grams made of the same Cu-Ni clad composition that had been put into use for dimes and quarters since 1965 and was used for the larger circulating Eisenhower dollar coins. The year 1978 saw the Eisenhower dollar, short-lived though it was, come to a close.

The small D mintmark above the date signifies that this coin was struck at the Denver Mint. It is by all accounts a typical issue from this late-modern-era U.S. The 1978-D’s mintage of 33,102,890 coins puts the issue as the fourth-highest Denver mintage of the series. The low came from the 1973 emission, where coins were struck for the annual Mint Set (although at least one bag of 1973 coins has been reported as having been released into the wild).

The high came during the American Bicentennial year of 1976 at the Philadelphia Mint. Throughout the series’ eight-year run, production of the coin swung from as high as 113 million to as low as 1.76 million. As Americans faced the daily horrors that played out on the nightly news reporting from Vietnam, the sentiment to honor one of America’s last great war heroes overrode all other concerns and another dollar coin was born. The copper-nickel clad large dollar came into existence in 1971 as a memorial to the recently passed and beloved war-hero-turned President Dwight D. Denver had the honor of striking slightly more, and as had been the case through the entire series, struck them better than the coin operators at the mother mint. The era of the big dollar coin was already coming to a close when the United States Mint struck the last 59,000,000 Eisenhower dollar coins for circulation at the Denver and Philadelphia mints. The End of the Era of the Large Dollar Coin

1972 eisenhower dollar value d