Lear Capital, the West Los Angeles- based precious metals company has assembled the world’s finest known $4 gold coin set that includes four of all the finest known Stella coins. A collector has commissioned the four coins to create one of the most expensive sets available. The set is valued at more than $6.5 million.

To complete the set, Lear spent three years trying to obtain an 1880 Coiled Hair Four Dollar Stella for its client, a prominent New York businessman who collects rare coins. Lear obtained the “Four Dollar Stella” in late 2007. As one-of-only-eight known, this 1880 Coiled Hair Four Dollar Stella is the finest known and valued at more than $3 million.

The Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC), the official grading service of the American Numismatic Association and a provider of third-party coin grading services, graded all four coins. The set can be viewed online at http://www.ngccoin.com/stella.

“We relied upon the Numismatic Guaranty Corporation and their expertise in grading to help assemble the finest known set and it has been an honor working side-by-side with such professionals,” says Kevin DeMeritt, president of Lear Capital. “It is a gorgeous and impressive set that contains so much American history.”

The “Four Dollar Stella” completes a set that contains an 1879 Flowing Hair (425 known), 1879 Coiled Hair (12 known), and an 1880 Flowing Hair (17 known). The set contains the finest known examples of each date.

The Four Dollar Stella (From NGC)

Stellas are four-dollar pattern coins. They are remnants of a move to recognize the Latin Monetary Union, an alliance of member nations which agreed to create an international coinage. While the US never formally joined, several efforts were made to conform US coinage to standards used more broadly. One visible step, for example, was to normalize US coinage with the metric scale by making a modest weight change on US silver coinage. The change was indicated on our silver coins by surrounding the date with arrows — creating the With Arrows type coins of 1873 and 1874.

In 1879, members of Congress proposed a four-dollar coin to compete globally with similarly valued pieces, including the French 20 franc coin, the Spanish 20 pesetas, the Dutch and Austrian 8 florins and the Italian 20 lire. To correspond with the proposed legislation, the US Mint struck pattern four dollar coins in 1879 and 1880. The four-dollar coin received an entirely new designation: “stella” (Latin for star). This was analogous to the term “eagle,” used for the ten-dollar denomination, both the star and the eagle being national emblems on our coins. The pattern coins had a unique design, and were made with two obverses, one with Flowing Hair engraved by Charles Barber and another with Coiled Hair by George Morgan.

The authorizing legislation for the stella ultimately failed in Congress. Today, only numismatists remember the dream of a universal coinage system that created these fascinating coins.

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