Coronet Head Large Cents
Large cent production resumed in December 1816 after the one-year wartime gap, and with it came a new design by Robert Scot, who had been Chief Engraver since 1793 and was now somewhere in his early…
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Indian Head Gold $10 Eagles
President Theodore Roosevelt's collaboration with Augustus Saint-Gaudens began around 1904 and called for redesigning the four denominations of gold coinage. Saint-Gaudens had originally developed…
Seated Liberty Half Dollars
Christian Gobrecht created the Liberty Seated motif for the pattern silver dollars of 1836 and 1838, and the design passed to the half dollar in 1839. Liberty sits facing left on a rock, her left…
Liberty Head Nickels (V)
By the early 1880s there was broad agreement that the Shield nickel had run its course. The design had been widely criticized since its introduction in 1866, its copper-nickel alloy continued to…
Bust (Original) Half Disme
The Constitution gave Congress the exclusive right to coin money, settling a question that had produced chaotic results under the Articles of Confederation. The conceptual architecture of the new…
Roosevelt Dimes
Franklin D. Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1945, at age 63, after twelve years as the 32nd President of the United States. A tenure that spanned the Great Depression, the New…
Peace Dollars
By late 1921 numismatists who had campaigned since 1918 for a coin commemorating the armistice had persuaded the Treasury Department to act. Rather than producing a half dollar as originally…
Flowing Hair Half Dollars
Every Flowing Hair half dollar carries lettering on its edge that no other United States coin has ever replicated: FIFTY CENTS OR HALF A DOLLAR. Not just a denomination mark, not a motto, but a…
Capped Bust Gold $5 Half Eagles
When John Reich joined the Mint as Assistant Engraver in April 1807, Mint Director Robert Patterson gave him the half eagle as his first redesign assignment. Reich's obverse placed Liberty facing…
Flowing Hair Large Cents
The Philadelphia Mint struck its first large cent on February 27, 1793. By the end of that same year it had abandoned two designs, introduced a third, and produced six distinct varieties across two…
Draped Bust Large Cents
The Draped Bust large cent arrived in November 1796 as part of a deliberate effort to bring visual consistency across American coinage. The Mint had been running different portraits on different…
Draped Bust Gold $10 Eagles
Alexander Hamilton's 1791 report on establishing the Mint proposed the ten-dollar gold piece as the benchmark denomination of the new federal monetary system, though Hamilton himself found the name…