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.

Two centuries later, many foreign countries are producing bimetallic and even trimetallic coins of a similar nature, not so much to provide a given value of metal but to make it harder for counterfeiters to imitate them. As the fledgling Mint discovered, it is extremely difficult to make a bimetallic coin, but it is wonderful that they tried.

The first extended run of patterns began in 1835, when Assistant Engraver Christian Gobrecht took over the engraving department from ailing Chief Engraver William Kneass. After remodelling the large cent, a task he seemingly was never satisfied with and repeated over and over, Gobrecht went on to prepare several variations of a seated Liberty figure and a coronet head that were used in some form on American silver coins until 1891 and gold coins until 1908.

Gobrecht did his job so well that his successor, James B. Longacre, did not have to create a new design until 1849, when the gold Dollar and Double Eagle were added. Longacre was inexperienced at creating new designs, and did not finish the $20 until the end of the year. The unique 1849 trial strike in gold is one of the most lusted after of American patterns, though it is currently entombed in the Smithsonian collection.

Perhaps when the post of Curator of Numismatics at the Smithsonian is abolished as planned in the foreseeable future, this piece will be auctioned off by the General Services Administration to the highest bidder. Let us hope that he or she is an American.

Most of Longacre’s patterns through 1857 were derivative of other designs, but eventually he developed a style of his own and created the Indian cent and several variations of a Liberty or a Washington head, as well as several new designs that were actually adopted for circulation. His 1856 Flying Eagle cent and 1864 Small Motto two cents are classic examples of pattern designs which were adopted as is and pressed into immediate use for circulating coinage.

Longacre’s successor, William Barber, began the golden age of pattern coins with the Amazonian gold and silver pieces of 1872. Over the next 13 years Barber, his son Charles and Charles’ rival, George T. Morgan, crafted dozens of breathtaking patterns such as the Sailor Head, the Schoolgirl, the Washlady and the Shield Earring design of which, unfortunately, none saw regular production. The reader is referred at this point to any of the several excellent references on the subject to see these patterns, and others too numerous to mention, for himself.

The first published listing of American “patterns” appeared as a series of articles written by Philadelphia apothecary, numismatist and pattern collector R. Coulton Davis for the “Coin Collector’s Journal” between July, 1885 and January, 1887. Davis was well acquainted with the Mint’s inner circle, and no doubt had access to some of the numerous patterns then being sold to friendly collectors such as himself.

Davis’ listing totaled 479 pieces, organized by date in ascending denomination within the date, plus 34 new findings in an addendum published in 1887. Many of the pieces were from his personal collection, including more than a few counterfeits and other pieces later identified as being privately made restrikes from discarded Mint dies.

The first listing in book form, “United States Pattern, Trial, and Experimental Pieces,” was produced by the collaboration of numismatic writer Edgar H. Adams and wealthy collector William H. Woodin through the American Numismatic Society in 1913. Paper money collectors will recognize Woodin’s signature as Secretary of the Treasury on various small-size notes issued during his term from March 4 to December 31, 1933, but pattern collectors know him better as the only acknowledged owner of the two 1877 “Half Union” (a proposed $50 bullion issue) specimens known in gold, the largest and heaviest American patterns ever struck.

The numismatic world was amazed to learn in 1909 that the two bullion pieces, struck in 1877 and reported by Davis in 1886 as having been melted to recover their gold after the Mint could not get $100 appropriated to buy them for the Mint’s collection, had been purchased by Woodin from an unnamed source for $10,000 each, or some ten times what an 1804 Dollar would bring at the same time. The acquisition received so much publicity that the Treasury Dept. was embarassed into seeking their return, and secretly offering Woodin two chests of assorted pattern strikings that had accumulated over the decades in exchange for them. These chests of coins formed the core of Woodin’s fabulous collection, and provided the basis for the 1913 work.

(One wonders if there was any connection between the negotiated seizure of Woodin’s unique gold patterns in 1910 and the Treasury Department’s bloodhound assault on the 1933 Double Eagles which quietly left the Mint during Woodin’s term of office. One could speculate idly that Woodin may have had something to do with the release of the 1933’s, or that he vindictively felt that what was good enough for him in 1910 was good enough for a new generation of collectors in 1933, or alternately that he was completely innocent of either of these charges but felt it necessary to pursue the coins to avoid even the suggestion of any wrongdoing. We will never know.)

Adams chose to retain the date format, but perhaps in the interests of being different than Davis inverted the order within each year from highest denomination down to lowest. The pieces were numbered sequentially, and totaled 1752 pieces through the 1910 five cent pieces. Unfortunately, most of the spurious pieces listed by Davis were copied into A-W.

An interesting quote from the Introduction to A-W reads as follows: “Any change in the design of our coinage must be referred to and adopted by the Coinage Committee of Congress. Therefore it is not difficult to understand why the handsomest designs produced by our engravers were not adopted and why most of the accepted designs of our coinage compares unfavorably from an artistic standpoint with almost any other country. The best efforts of our engravers have been most invariably rejected and their poorest designs adopted.” Nowadays the issues of 1913 are highly prized; what would Adams and Woodin have thought of the Anthony dollar?

The next generation pattern book was prepared by Dr. J. Hewitt Judd in 1959, assisted by William Guild and Walter Breen. The good doctor and his team added many interesting comments about the coins and the times in which they were struck, and created an enjoyably readable book that exposed many new collectors to the field. They retained the date order of listing, but by re-inverting A-W’s denomination order back to an ascending format re-invented Davis’ listing, though in a much more thorough manner.

Their listings ended with the new silver designs of 1916, at 1802 entries, and they included several appendices that recorded for historical purposes generally unique pieces such as one-sided die trials and off-metal error strikings that were variously considered as or confused with die trials. They deliberately did not include pieces struck after 1916, and included the comment “A number of experimental pieces of various kinds have been made since 1916. As these may not legally be held by private collectors, they are considered beyond the scope of this volume.”

When Abe Kosoff, a veteran coin dealer who had handled many pattern rarities over the years, took over the rights to the Judd book and was preparing the sixth edition of it, I wrote to him from Coin World and asked him why the book said that patterns after 1916 were illegal. He said that he did not know, but would inquire of the Treasury Department about it.

Eventually he received a letter from them that said in effect that the post-1916 patterns were illegal “because this book says they are,” and included a photocopy of the relevant page from a Judd catalog with the comment in question circled! Abe changed the comment in the sixth edition, and presumably by doing so made the post-1916 pieces legal!

The first attempt at organizing the field according to a logical classification of the intent of a given piece was made by Don Taxay in the 1971 edition of”The Comprehensive Catalogue and Encyclopedia of United States Coins” published by Scott Publications. Unfortunately, the system was extremely difficult for the layman to understand, and it was not clarified in the subsequent 1976 edition.

After Coin World purchased Scott Publications in the 1980’s, a third and thoroughly revised edition of the Comprehensive Catalogue was prepared by David T. Alexander and myself in 1990. For the pattern section I chose to scrap the difficult Taxay system and instead reorganize all of the patterns according to denomination and to attempt to identify the intent of each particular piece within this framework. I refer you to this book to see if this arrangement meets with your approval.

The new “United States Patterns and Related Issues” by Andrew W. Pollack III returns to the style of Judd, but with improved descriptions of the designs and exhaustive records of auction appearances. The pieces have all been renumbered, making ownership of the new book particularly valuable.

One fascinating aspect of patterns is that there is always something new under the sun waiting to be discovered. Just this past Summer a previously unreported 1974 One Cent metalurgical trial piece was revealed to exist. The piece, struck on a copper-clad steel core similar to that of the current German Pfennig, was rejected because the U.S. Mint claimed that it could not do what the German mints have done for years. Other modern patterns, perhaps involving the Susan B. Anthony dollar, are rumored to exist.

Why are patterns so interesting? I guess it is because they are so strange and wonderful and because, like the coins of a certain Central American republic, they are not Morgan Dollars. (Well, most of them aren’t.) What none of them are is boring!!! Enjoy.!!!

Republished with Permission from Harlan J Berk

Related posts:

1. Phenomenal Simpson Collection of United States Pattern Coins Helps NGC Launch Plus Designation
2. THE TEN COOLEST UNITED STATES COINS REVISITED
3. Ten Underappreciated Early United States Gold Coins
4. Overdated United States Gold Coins
5. RareGoldCoins.com to sell the “Liberty Cap Collection” of early United States Coins
6. United States Mint Issues Commemorative Bald Eagle Coins
7. United States Mint Reveals Four New 2008 Presidential $1 Coins
8. CONTROVERSIAL 1853 UNITED STATES ASSAY OFFICE $20 COINS DECLARED TRANSFER DIE FORGERIES
9. Legend Numismatics Arranges $30+ Million Sale of Pattern Coins
10. United States Mint to Adopt New Brand Indenty: “Connecting America through Coins”