Gem survivors of the circulation mintage of 1839-O half dollars are nearly as rare as the elusive Specimens. The recorded mintage for the date is 116,000 coins, most of which were immediately put into use in the busy commercial region centered in New Orleans. In 1842, Philadelphia Mint assayers Jacob Eckfeldt and William DuBois called New Orleans "the commercial emporium of the Southwest," serving as the principal banking and trading hub of the lower Mississippi Valley. Nearly all river trade downstream from the forks of the Ohio at Pittsburgh passed through New Orleans. The 832,000 bales of cotton that were exported from New Orleans between October 1, 1839 and September 30, 1840 surpassed the cotton traffic of all other American ports combined. The city dominated the export of other products of the American interior, from apples to tobacco, and played a similarly important role in imports from Europe, the West Indies and Latin America, and Africa.

The example to the left was sold by Stack's Bowers Galleries in the D. Brent Pogue Part IV Auction, where it realized $211,500.