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.
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By Tom Delorey – Harlan J Berk Ltd.

The Morgan Dollar has long been one of the most popular American coin series, apparently second only to the Lincoln cent in the number of people who collect it in some manner, and the 1895-P dollar has long been called “The King of Morgan Dollars.”

However, for an equally long time it has been one of the more frustrating series to the collector who seeks completeness in his sets, as no numismatist has ever been able to fill the 1895-P hole in his Whitman album or Capital plastic holder with a genuine business strike specimen, despite a reported mintage of exactly 12,000 coins.

Wealthy collectors have usually been able to fill that hole with one of the 880 Proofs struck in that year, always available at a healthy price several times what a Proof from a “common” year would bring, and I have even seen a few sets where an 1895-P gold Double Eagle rattled about the dollar-sized hole.

Perhaps a hundred of the Proofs are currently known in various circulated conditions at slightly more reasonable prices, having been spent over the years by hard-up collectors during the Great Depression, children buying candy without their Father’s knowledge and garden-variety thieves, and it is not impossible that another fifty or so have been permanently lost due to lengthy circulation and/or melting. Many hundreds of 1895-O&S dollars also exist with their mint marks removed, though most of those so altered were mutilated many years ago before the branch mint coins of this year became expensive, (in part because so many of them were altered!)

Conventional wisdom has long held that the 12,000 business strikes must have been melted down in accordance with the Pittman Act of 1918, when the U.S. government reduced some 270,000,000 silver dollars to bar form and shipped the bars to India. There the British government, bankrupted by the war in Europe but desperately in need of the war materiels provided by its colonial empire, converted the silver into Rupees to pay the workers producing these goods. It is hard to say if the colonial subjects would have felt enough loyalty to a foreign monarch to have continued to work for free, but the monarch probably slept better knowing he did not have to test this loyalty. (more…)

By Tom DeLorey

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.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote of Morris in 1888: “Gouverneur Morris was the founder of our national coinage.” His undenominated Nova Constellatio coppers circulated widely in the newly independent nation, and are generally collected as early American coins. A complete set of the Nova Constellatio patterns is currently being offered for sale by Stack’s in the neighborhood of $3,000,000.

The first universally recognized U.S. patterns are the various 1792 cents, half dismes, dismes and quarter dollars struck after the U.S. Mint was authorized but before it actually opened in 1793. The cents are extremely interesting for an experiment whereby a small plug of silver was placed inside a ring of copper to create a piece which had the intrinsic value of one cent without the weight of a cent’s worth of copper. (more…)