2023-D Louisiana

The 2023-D Louisiana Innovation Dollar is the Denver striking honoring the Higgins Boat, the shallow-draft landing craft Andrew Jackson Higgins designed and built in New Orleans for the WWII Allied amphibious campaigns. The reverse depicts the boat with its bow ramp deployed on a beach, the moment that defined its battlefield purpose at Normandy, North Africa, Sicily, and across the Pacific island campaigns. Reverse inscriptions read THE HIGGINS BOAT, LOUISIANA, and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Higgins Industries built roughly 23,000 of these LCVPs (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) at New Orleans plants, a production volume Eisenhower later credited as the design that won the war. Louisiana earned the eighteenth-state slot through its April 30, 1812 admission, and the design was developed by U.S. Mint Artistic Infusion Program artist Dennis Friel and sculpted by Medallic Artist John P. McGraw. Denver's 411,950 mintage, released April 10, 2023 in rolls and bags through the Mint catalog, is one of the lower circulation totals of the program to that point.

What collectors look for on the Denver issue is strike sharpness on the bow ramp lip and on the rivet lines running down the hull, both of which sit at the high points of the relief and lose definition first when dies wear. The wave detail under the hull and the textured beach foreground are the second tell; soft dies leave both as undefined surfaces. Manganese-brass clad reacts with skin oils and ambient sulfur, so coins handled bare often show fingerprint outlines and irregular toning streaks within months, an alloy quirk rather than a strike fault. Authentication risk is low; counterfeiters do not target a sub-two-dollar circulation Innovation Dollar.

The 2023-D holds the regular classification under site convention. It is a common date by absolute mintage, but the graded population at PCGS, the Professional Coin Grading Service, and NGC remains thin because most coins stayed in original Mint rolls and never reached a slab. Realistic acquisition is a clean BU example for low single digits direct from a broken Mint roll, with MS67 affordable when it appears and MS68 the genuine condition tier. The WWII-themed-collector overlay on this design pulls some demand outside the usual date-set crowd. For the broader program context, see the American Innovation Dollar series history.