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The old San Francisco Mint building, built in 1874.

The San Francisco Mint is a branch of the United States Mint, and was opened in 1854 to serve the gold mines of the California Gold Rush. It quickly outgrew its first building and moved into a new one in 1874. This building, one of the few that survived the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, served until 1937, when the present facility was opened.

The new San Francisco Mint building, built in 1937.

Within the first year of its operation, the San Francisco mint turned $4 million in gold bullion into coins, in its first building, containing sixty square feet of floor space. The building that was completed in 1874 was designed by Alfred B. Mullett in a conservative Greek Revival style with a sober Doric order. The building had a central pedimented portico flanked by projecting wings in an E-shape; it was built round a completely enclosed central courtyard that contained a well—the features that saved it during the fire of 1906, when the heat melted the plate glass windows and exploded sandstone and granite blocks with which it was faced. The building sat on a concrete and granite foundation, designed to thwart tunneling into its vaults, which at the time of the 1906 fire held $300 million, fully a third of the United States' gold reserves. Heroic efforts by Superintendent of the Mint, Frank Leach, and his men preserved the building and the bullion that backed the nation's currency.

The new San Francisco Mint building as it appears today.

In 1961 the Old Mint, as it had become, was designated a National Historic Landmark. In 2003 the federal government sold the structure to the City of San Francisco for one dollar—an 1879 silver dollar struck at the mint— for use as the San Francisco History Museum. Ground was broken for renovations that would turn the central court into a glass-enclosed galleria in the fall of 2005.

Beginning in 1955, circulating coinage from San Francisco was suspended for 13 years. In 1968, it took over most proof coinage production from the Philadelphia Mint, but continued striking a supplemental circulating coinage from 1968 through 1974. Since 1975, the San Francisco Mint has been used only for proof coinage, with the exception of the Susan B. Anthony dollar from 1979-81 and a portion of the mintage of cents in the early 1980s. The dollars bear a mintmark of an "S", but the cents are otherwise indistinguishable from those minted at Philadelphia (which bear no mintmarks).

• Official government site
• "New San Francisco Mint" article (1936)
• Michael Castleman, "Grace under fire", Smithsonian Magazine April 2006, pp 56ff Mint Superintendent Frank Leach and his men saved the mint during the San Francisco fire, 1906.