Double Gold Eagle coins are a representative of a huge amount of money, even now , but especially in the 1900's where a single double eagle coin would have been more money than many would make in a week's time.
Here is a neat example to visualize how much money a twenty dollar coin back in the early 1900's would get you. For our example let us strap on our history helmets and travel to New York City circa 1900-ish. First we will need a place to stay, with our single twenty dollar coin let us go on over to the Plaza Hotel, still popular even today. A one night's stay is going to run us a dollar and fifty cents($1.50). With that out of the way, I do not know about you but I am getting hungry, so let us go grab a beer and a sandwich next door; for another nickel ($0.05) we have lunch. Maybe you brought a sepcial someone on your trip to the big city and they want to see a Broadway show, so get out the coin purse again for another thirty five cents ($0.35).

So far, we have a place to stay, we have eaten our lunch, and now have plans for a show and we still have only spent, a grand total of $1.90! Well either before or after the show we will want to take our special guest to a nice dinner. So feeling pretty Rockefeller we head over to Delmonico's, where our combined meals would run us maybe another dollar ($1.00), give or take. Then after the show maybe we get a nightcap at the hotel lounge, so from our original double gold eagle coin worth twenty dollars ($20.00) we would now have about fifteen dollars ($15.00)left, with some other change. The next morning we have so much left over that the ridiculous price of the hotel breakfast is not going to stop us from getting it.

See, that is the buying power of gold, circa 1900. Even today though, gold coins are a great investment for our future plans. We obviously wouldn't head out to the local Burger King with a gold eagle in our pocket to buy lunch, but hey I think you get the idea here. Gold is good, then and now.

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Until the time of the great California Gold Rush, the largest minted coin in the United States was a ten dollar face value coin, which was comprised of approximately ½ of a troy ounce. For those who want to know a troy ounce is, as taken directly from Wikipedia, for who else can say it better than a great many of our peers who enjoy sharing their knowledge freely on the internet itself.

“The troy ounce (ozt) is a unit of imperial measure. In the present day it is most commonly used to gauge the weight and therefore the price of precious metals.

The troy ounce is part of the troy weights system derived from the Roman monetary system. The Romans used bronze bars of varying weights as currency. An aes grave weighed equal to 1 pound. One twelfth of an aes grave was called an uncia, or in English an "ounce". Later standardization would change the ounce to 1/16 of a pound (the avoirdupois ounce), but the 1/12 pound troy ounce was retained for the measure of precious metals. At 480 grains, the troy ounce is heavier than the avoirdupois ounce, which weighs 437.5 grains. A grain is 64.7989 milligrams (mg); hence one troy ounce is 31.1035 grams (g), about 10 percent more than the avoirdupois ounce, which is 28.3495 g.”

Now with that said, when in 1849 the Congress of the United States authorized a twenty dollar coin, it was called the 'double gold eagle' because it was larger and held twice the value of the original. Soon after, and for years to come, gold came in from Nevada, Arizona Colorado and even Alaska, hundreds of millions of ounces actually. These double gold eagle coins were then created and depicted the boom of the “Gold Rush” itselfs and also showed the inherent wealth of the United States in the later half of the 1800's.

Double Gold Eagle, American Gold Eagle,

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