[1] Within the first year of its operation, the San Francisco mint turned $4 million in gold bullion into coins.

The second US Mint building here, completed in 1874 for the Department of the Treasury, was designed by Alfred B. Mullett in a conservative Greek Revival style with a sober Doric order.

These features saved it during the fires that followed the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, when the heat melted the plate glass windows and exploded sandstone and granite blocks with which it was faced.

At the time of the 1906 earthquake, the Mint held $300 million (~$7.63 billion in 2023), fully a third of the United States' gold reserves.

Efforts by Superintendent of the Mint, Frank A. Leach, and his men preserved the building and the bullion that backed the nation's currency.

Since 1975, the San Francisco Mint has been used almost exclusively for proof coinage, with the exception of the Susan B. Anthony dollar from 1979–81, a portion of the mintage of cents in the early 1980s, and circulation-strike America the Beautiful quarters marked with an "S" mintmark and issued only for collectors since 2012.