2009 Formative Years, Zinc

The 2009 Formative Years cent in standard zinc composition circulated alongside three other bicentennial designs honoring Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday. Charles Vickers designed the reverse, sculpted by Jim Licaretz, showing a young Lincoln seated on a log absorbed in a book. The image references Lincoln's formative period in Indiana, where his family settled in 1816 near Little Pigeon Creek in Spencer County. Life on the Indiana frontier was difficult. Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died of milk sickness in 1818 when Abraham was nine years old. His father remarried the following year to Sarah Bush Johnston, who encouraged young Abraham's love of reading.

By the time Lincoln left Indiana for Illinois in 1830, he had grown into a tall, strong young man known for his storytelling, physical strength, and intellectual curiosity. He had made a flatboat journey down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, gaining his first exposure to the wider world and to the realities of slavery in the Deep South. The Philadelphia Mint produced these zinc cents as part of a combined mintage of approximately 284.4 million across all four designs. The coin weighs 2.5 grams and measures 19.05 millimeters in diameter, maintaining the same physical specifications the cent had carried since 1857.