Date breaks for dates prior to 1902

I am developing a site for historical ecologists. They need to populate a cck date field that references the relevant date of the information. That date can be more than 100 years ago. Drupal with faceted search has been a great way to manage this info and search it. However, dates prior to 1902 do not appear in the faceted search. What does appear is the parentheses with the number entries of that date, but no date and/or link.

Expected behavior:

1850 (1)
1890 (5)
1900 (3)
1950 (5)
and so on,

Actual behavior:
(1)
(5)
(3)
1950 (5)
and so on,

I have used the devel module to see if the variable is missing. Not so. The cck variable is there and I can see the string with the year in it. Just no appearing in faceted search.