What is an Eagle? According to my 1975 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, it is a diurnal bird of prey noted for its strength, size, gracefulness, keenness of vision and powers of flight; the silver insignia of rank for an Army colonel or a Navy captain; or a member of the Fraternal Order of Eagles. In golf, it is the completion of a hole in two strokes less than par. In gold, it is a coin!

Specifically, my Webster’s says it is a ten-dollar gold coin of the U.S. bearing an eagle on the reverse. My 1969 American Heritage Dictionary goes so far as to call it a “former” gold coin of the United States having a face value of ten dollars, without specifying if it was “formerly gold” since transmuted into base metal, “formerly a coin” but now demonetized, or something that has ceased in an Orwellian way to have ever existed at all.

However, either antiquated edition might as well have been set in type by Gutenberg, as they both predate the current American Eagle one ounce gold coin first struck in 1986 with a face value of $50. This new coin left us with two different legal tender “Eagles” of different weights, sizes, finenesses (usually) and denominations, and hardly a day goes by at Berk’s that we do not have to explain the difference to a would-be customer.

How did the first Eagle come to be? The path is long and twisted. It began with the Articles of Confederation, approved by the Continental Congress on November 15, 1777, but not ratified by the states until March 1, 1781, which reserved for the newly-named “United States in Congress Assembled” the sole right to regulate the values, compositions and alloys of coins struck by itself or by the various states. (more…)

The most interesting field in American numismatics is, in my humble opinion, the broad spectrum of proposed designs, experimental alloys and finished or unfinished die trial pieces collectively known as Patterns. Some of these pieces are much more beautiful than the predictably uninspired work the U.S. Mint is producing today, while others recollect bold new ideas of form and function that a timid Treasury was afraid to adopt for fear of change and the reaction to it.

Just yesterday I held a specimen of an 1877 pattern half dollar in silver, Judd-1528, with a crested helmet that rivals in beauty the Athenian “new style” tetradrachms of two millennia before, brought up to date with a defiant American eagle engraved upon the side of the helmet. The reverse of the piece bears a Heraldic Eagle design as traditional as that of the $2-1/2 gold piece of 1796 and as up to date as the American Eagle silver dollar currently being produced.

Some people consider the first U.S. pattern to be the 1776 Continental Dollar struck in silver and/or in brass, the pewter version being the regular issue for the denomination. Unfortunately, nobody knows for sure what metal the Continental Congress actually intended to be the ultimate composition of this first U.S. dollar coin, and so many pattern specialists refuse to recognize any version of it as an actual trial piece.

The 1783 Nova Constellatio patterns engraved by Benjamin Dudley for Gouverneur Morris, assistant to the Superintendent of Finance for the American Confederation Robert Morris, have an equally valid claim to the title of the first U.S. patterns. Though the silver 1000, 500 and 100 units pieces and the unique copper 5 units coin were never authorized by the Continental Congress, Dudley had been placed on the government payroll to prepare a Mint in Philadelphia and is believed to have been paid for preparing the pattern dies. (more…)

Having criticized the generic term “The Mint” several times in the past few years for actions which were sometimes the fault of the Treasury Department or Congress or others, I thought it might be a good time for me to compliment the United States Mint proper for one of its generally successful numismatic programs, the Proof set.

Although many of the commemorative coin and medal programs dumped in the lap of the U. S. Mint by a greedy and/or indifferent Congress since 1936 have proven to be less than wonderful, whether in marketing or design or purpose, the regular design Proof sets offered as superior examples of the coiner’s art have generally been considered to be a credit to the Mints that have struck them. Though some of the post-1967 sets have declined in value since they were originally sold, this is generally not the fault of the Mint, but rather the fault of speculators who overbuy an issue in the hopes it will prove scarce and then dump it on the market if it does not.

The first of the three modern eras of Proof sets began in 1936, after a 20-year lapse allegedly caused by concern over the impending entry of the U.S. into World War I (which did not occur until April of 1917), but more likely brought on by collector dislike of the Matte Proof finishes used on certain coins of the 1908-1916 period and the technical difficulties involved in trying to “Proof,” or polish, the textured surfaces of the new 1916 silver coins.

I have no idea why the 1916 Barber Dime and Quarter were not struck in brilliant Proof even if there were no plans to strike a 1916 Barber Half, but as sales of the silver Proof sets had fallen drastically in previous years (380 in 1914 and 450 in 1915) it may have been thought that they just weren’t worth the bother. The classical Proof set era begun with a bang in 1858 ended with a whimper in 1916 with only the Matte Proof Cent and Five Cents being offered to collectors, no regular issue gold coins being struck in Philadelphia in 1916 and hence no Proofs.

Once the decision was made to stop making Proofs, bureaucratic inertia saw to it that the same policy was observed in the next year, and the next, etc. I have never seen a good reason given as to why the production of Proof coins was resumed in 1936, but it is possible that the commemorative coin frenzy which reached its peak in that year inspired the Mint to imitate the Post Office, which since 1934 had been making a tidy sum selling specially prepared souvenir sheets of otherwise regular design stamps to collectors. (more…)

By Thomas K. DeLorey - Copyright - Reprinted with permission. Harlan J Berk

Photos used with permission and courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries

When asked to write an article on the ten most significant U.S. commemorative coins for this issue, I chortled and thought to myself what an easy assignment this was going to be! I had just that day finished reading galleys for the commemorative coin section of the Coin World “Comprehensive Catalogue and Encyclopedia of U.S. Coins” edited by David T. Alexander and myself, and all of the material was fresh in my mind.

However, when I went back over the listings with a consideration in mind of their national importance rather than a straightforward documentation of them, I suddenly realized how hard it was going to be to find ten pieces that were truly significant! After weeding out the 14 state commemoratives and most of the town, county, island, mountain, trail, bridge and music center commemoratives, there were scarcely ten pieces left that were both national and significant. Here’s what I came up with, though you might disagree.

Number one on my list is the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition half dollar of 1892 and 1893, in part because the fact that Columbus landed in what we now call “the Americas” in 1492 was one of the major historical events of the last millennium, and in part because it was the first U.S. commemorative and set the stage for all that followed, good or bad. (more…)