1879 Flowing Hair Proof

One of the most ambitious experiments in American coinage produced the 1879 Flowing Hair Stella. John A. Kasson, the United States Minister to Austria-Hungary, pushed for a four-dollar gold piece whose weight and fineness would slot neatly alongside the French 20-franc, the Dutch 8-florin, and the Spanish 20-peseta, giving American travelers and merchants a coin that any European bank window would accept without conversion. Congress authorized pattern strikings to test the idea, and Charles E. Barber, newly elevated to Chief Engraver after his father William's death in January 1879, prepared the Flowing Hair obverse paired with a five-pointed star reverse. The Latin name Stella followed naturally from that central device. None of the four Stella varieties was ever struck for circulation, and the 1879 Flowing Hair is by a wide margin the most attainable of the four.

Specifications are unusual: 7.0 grams total, 22 millimeters across, with a metric alloy of 85.71 percent gold, 4.29 percent silver, and 10 percent copper, struck in proof finish on a reeded edge with coin alignment. The composition is declared right on the obverse in the legend 6 G .3 S .7 C 7 GRAMS, an explicit metric breakdown unprecedented for a federal issue. Two attribution checks matter most. First, confirm the Flowing Hair portrait, with Liberty's tresses cascading freely down her neck, which separates Barber's design from George T. Morgan's Coiled Hair variant struck the same year. Second, examine the hair strands, the surrounding stars, and the rim under 5x to 10x magnification for tooling marks, solder traces, or rim repairs. A high percentage of surviving Stellas were mounted as jewelry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and unimpaired surfaces command large premiums.

Original mintage stands at roughly 425 pieces, with surviving population estimates of 250 to 300 across all grades. PCGS or NGC certification with documented auction provenance from Heritage, Stack's Bowers, or the Pogue dispersal is the realistic authentication path, since raw examples almost always raise questions about prior mounting or repair. Auction results in PR63 through PR65 typically land between 200,000 and 400,000 dollars, and top-grade PR67 and PR68 cameos have crossed 500,000 dollars at Heritage. Even the most available Stella sits well outside casual budgets, which is what gives the 1879 Flowing Hair its place at the entry point of the toughest four-coin set in American gold. See the full Four-Dollar Stella series history.