Image: Denver Mint building
The Denver Mint has been producing pennies here for over a century. NY Public Library
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“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nation's budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” President Donald Trump pronounced back in February on Truth Social, even as he returned to Washington, D.C., from a pricey jaunt to the Super Bowl.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”
Trump's order hits home, since the Denver Mint is one of just two federal mints (out of four coin-producing facilities) that makes pennies, and also a favorite tourist attraction. The other penny-producing mint is Philadelphia, which at least won the Super Bowl as a consolation prize.
And the Treasury Department just confirmed that it's ditching the penny, according to the Wall Street Journal. When the last blanks run out, no more one-cent coins will be produced.
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This isn't the first time the penny has come under fire. Between 2020 and 2022, the cost of producing a penny nearly doubled. In 2023, the U.S. Mint reported that because of inflation, it took three pennies to make just one — and more than ten cents to make a nickel. By last year, the cost per penny was up to nearly 3.7 cents.
Fortunately, the Denver Mint — which can make up to 50 million coins a day, about a third of them pennies — makes money on dimes and quarters.
The Denver Mint has been producing coins since 1906. But this city's mint was actually established more than forty years earlier, by an act of Congress in 1862; it was initially created as an assay office at 16th and Market streets to handle all the gold coming in from miners.
In 1895, Congress authorized the Denver Mint to start making coins. A year later, the site for a new building was purchased at Colfax and Cherokee Street, but construction was not complete until 1904. Coin production did not start until 1906, because the machinery needed for production was on display at the St. Louis Exposition, according to the Colorado Encyclopedia. Penny production started in 1911.
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The Denver Mint is still located at the Colfax location and is the country's oldest continually operating U.S. Mint facility, although it's gone through several renovations over the years. In fact, the building required so much work in the 1960s that the feds debated moving the Denver Mint or closing it entirely.
According to a report issued on July 16, 1974, then-Denver Mint director Mary T. Brooks said the discussion had gone on so long that it had "endangered the mint remaining in Colorado." New Mexico was eager to step up; then-Senator Joseph Montoya had told her that "the site question could not be delayed much longer and reminded me that other cities, including Albuquerque, might be interested in having the mint."
Brooks considered locations along the South Platte River (close to where gold was first found in 1858), but that site was stymied by the railroads, or the Federal Center in Lakewood. Still, sentiment called for it to stay in Denver.
"There are considerable differences between the two sites with respect to secondary socio-economic impacts. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has stressed that moving the mint out of the city of Denver would be counterproductive to the previous and continuing efforts of the Federal Government to stimulate and renew the core city, which serves as the sustaining element for the entire Denver Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area," she noted in a very non-Trumpian consideration. "HUD also has emphasized favorable factors for all employees with the mint remaining in Denver, regarding availability of housing, social services and cultural facilities, particularly for the 41 percent of the present employees who are members of minority groups. The Office of Economic Opportunity also stressed these considerations."
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As a result, the feds — like the City of Denver itself — were pushing a third possibility: the then-34-year-old Park Hill Golf Course.
Brooks concluded her report with this: "I trust that with this significant milestone, we can proceed on this important project without further delay. Coinage requirements in recent years have grown at an annual rate of about 10 percent, and as our recent problem with meeting demands for pennies has emphasized, we urgently need the increased production capability which the new mint will provide."
The plan to move the mint to the Park Hill Golf Course made it all the way to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. Ultimately, though, government officials decided to instead renovate the mint at its Colfax location and keep producing those pennies.
But now the Treasury Department has ordered the Denver Mint to stop making cents.
At least the Park Hill Golf Course property has a brighter future: It's becoming Denver's fourth-largest park.
This story has been updated; it was originally published on February 10, 2025.