Patterns and experimental pieces form one of the most interesting groups of specimens associated with official coinage. It was customary for the Mint to provide samples of a proposed coin. More patterns were made in 1877 than in any other year. The Gold Rush in California prompted the merchants and bankers in San Francisco to lobby Congress for gold pieces of high denomination for quick counting purposes when a branch mint was established in their city in 1854. The design for the proposed large coin was similar to the $20 double eagle. Senator William Gwin of California introduced a bill for the adoption of this coin. His bill passed the Senate but failed to win approval in the House of Representatives. Although the coin was not approved, the proposal for such a large coin was feasible only after enough of the precious metal was available with the discovery of vast quantities in California. The depiction of Liberty on the obverse was a familiar symbol of national identity by 1877 for Americans.
Reverse Text: TEMPLETON REID ASSAYER / TEN DOLLARS
Description
Before the famous California gold rush, several important strikes were made in the East: in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The earliest took place in Mecklenburg County, N.C., in 1799, where a nugget weighing several pounds was discovered. Its finder used it as a doorstop until someone recognized it for what it was! Discoveries multiplied, and a federal branch Mint was eventually set up in Charlotte to process the metal into coinage.
Discoveries in Georgia and North Carolina in the 1820s received wide publicity, and a "gold fever" resulted. Thousands of people began trekking to the areas in search of instant wealth. Most returned home empty-handed, but successful prospectors found millions of dollars' worth of precious metal.
What should they do with their new wealth? Many felt the Philadelphia Mint was too far away for safe travel, and the government wasn't ready to create other coining facilities. A jack-of-all-trades named Templeton Reid had an answer: strike private gold coins, at a private mint. Reid had extensive experience as a watchmaker, gunsmith, and metalworker. In July 1830, he set up shop in the Georgia hamlet of Milledgeville and began his brief career as private moneyer-the first since Ephraim Brasher.
He later moved to Gainesville, which was closer to the gold mining district. His coins came in three denominations: ten dollars, five dollars, and two and one-half dollars, in recognition of "official" denominations. And he put slightly more gold into his products than the federal government did into its coins, just to be on the safe side.
Although historians believe that Templeton Reid conducted business fairly, an unknown adversary, signing himself simply "no assayer," published several notices in newspapers complaining that the coins were not as represented.
Rumors spread and before long Reid was forced to close up the business.
Obverse Image: Eagle standing on a rock, holding a shield, with a ribbon in its beak.
Obverse Text: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA / AUGUSTUS HUMBERT UNITED STATES ASSAYER OF GOLD CALIFORNIA / 1851 / 887 THOUS / FIFTY DOLLS
Reverse Image: Engine-turned design.
Reverse Text: N/A
Description
As early as 1850, agitation began in Congress for the establishment of a San Francisco branch of the United States Mint. This action was blocked by people from New York-who wanted a branch in their own state-and from Georgia and Louisiana-who argued that any California operation would represent unfair competition to the branch mints in Dahlonega and New Orleans.
The opposition won, and San Francisco would go without a mint for another four years. But it did get an odd sort of hybrid, the United States Assay Office of Gold, striking an odd sort of money-a gigantic, fifty-dollar ingot that would also do duty as a coin. The arrangement was made by the Treasury Department under a contract with Moffat & Company, private assayers and gold coiners in San Francisco.
Augustus Humbert came west to oversee the operation, which got under way at the end of January 1851. For most of the next two years, Humbert's fifty-dollar "slugs" were the principal accepted currency in California. He was eventually allowed to turn his attentions to the production of smaller, and altogether more useful, coins, ten- and twenty-dollar pieces. And his operation finally laid the framework for a formal, normal branch Mint, which began the production of ordinary federal coinage in the spring of 1854.
In 1848, the largest single gold rush in history was just getting under way in California. This event soon triggered a mass migration of fortune hunters from around the world. At the outset, much of the California gold was converted to coins by private minters in the San Francisco area. However, supplies of gold were also sent to Philadelphia where the metal was turned into ordinary federal coins.
Smaller quantities of gold made it to various locations including Oregon. Between March and September, 1849, an entity calling itself the Oregon Exchange Company struck $10 and $5 coins, by hand, in Oregon City. Both denominations bore simple designs. Their obverses depicted a beaver, the fur-bearing mammal that had spurred the first interest in the region. Above the animal, there were initials standing for the last names of the principal players in the operation.
The initials O.T. or T.O. (both for Oregon Territory) and the date rounded out the obverse design. For the reverse, the name of the issuing authority and the denomination sufficed. Scholars believe that around 2,850 of the $10 coins were made. Dies for them can still be seen at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland.
But the life of the Oregon mint was brief. The coiners set their products' weight above federal norms, and most of the Oregon coinage was melted down for profit. The mint ceased operation early in September 1849.
Someone once observed that a giraffe was a horse designed by a committee. The same might be said of this coin: what had seemed a good idea around a table in the boardroom proved to be an interesting but spectacular flop as it neared production.
The coin resulted from a project that President Theodore Roosevelt began in 1905 to redesign American coinage. He commissioned sculptor August Saint-Gaudens to create the new designs, and Saint-Gaudens developed a plan for an ultra-high relief $20 coin. The coin here, which appears to have been struck early in 1907, followed Saint-Gaudens' basic designs, but there the similarities ended.
This experimental coin contained twenty dollars' worth of gold, but it was squeezed into a coin the width of a ten-dollar piece. The discrepancy was handled by making the patterns much thicker than ordinary coins. Staff at the Mint wondered whether it was possible to decrease the diameter to have the best of both worlds: a coin in glorious high relief that didn't take quite as many blows of the press to create. The experiment failed. Although the patterns were unacceptable for commerce, word of their existence leaked out to the collecting community. An exasperated Mint Director wanted them called in and melted down. Somehow two escaped. Both are in the Smithsonian Collection.
Obverse Image: Left-facing Liberty wearing a coronet. 13 stars.
Obversre Text: LIBERTY / 1877
Reverse Image: A modified heraldic eagle with a shield over chest, holding a double scroll, clutching arrows and branch. Rays and stars above eagle.
Reverse Text: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA / FIFTY DOLLARS / IN GOD WE TRUST / E PLURIBUS UNUM
Description
Some twenty years after the private sector had abandoned the idea of a fifty-dollar gold piece in the mid-1850s, the Philadelphia Mint considered the possibility of a federal coin of this denomination. There was even talk of a "union," or hundred-dollar coin, and a drawing or two has survived to suggest what the Mint had in mind. But in the end, no such coin was ever produced.
The project went a bit farther in the case of the "half-union." Dies were prepared, the work of William Barber (father of the eventual Mint Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber).
Barber's obverse and reverse designs look vaguely akin to Longacre's work for the double eagle. A few patterns were struck in copper and two in gold; the latter share a reverse die but each has a slightly different obverse die. The project was abandoned soon afterwards, as it became apparent that the new coin simply wasn't needed.
A decade or so after the California Gold Rush began in the late 1840s, gold was discovered on the South Platte River, near the future city of Denver. As with the earlier strike, this one occasioned disputes over the value and purity of gold dust, as well as great difficulties in getting the precious metal all the way to Philadelphia to be coined there, and shipped back again.
Matters would be greatly simplified if a coiner, either private or public, could set up shop near the gold fields. A good candidate existed-Clark, Gruber & Co. Up to now, the firm had acted as brokers, bankers, and assayers. But if a coinage was wanted, Austin and Milton Clark and Emmanuel Gruber were up to the challenge and had the resources to do it right.
Milton Clark went back East to get the necessary machinery, three lots were purchased in Denver, and a two-story brick building soon went up on the property. Trial strikes of the four denominations to be coined ($2.50, $5, $10, and $20) were ready for inspection by mid-July 1860, and formal coinage began about a week after that.
One of the firm's most famous products showed a marvelous, if unrealistic, image of Pikes Peak, beneath which Denver-and the Clark, Gruber enterprise-sat. The facility remained in operation through 1862, although all of its coins were dated 1860 and 1861. It was elbowed out of the coining business in April 1863. It turned first into a federal assay office, then 43 years later, into another branch of the United States Mint.
If you look very closely at the reverse of this, the sole remaining "class two" 1804 dollar, you will discern a slight shifting of the relationship between the clouds and the lettering above them.
This discrepancy, which distinguishes it from the "class one" and "class three" 1804 dollars, suggests that a new reverse die was employed to strike the coin. This new die was necessary because the old one had either been broken, rusted, or simply discarded after the coinage of 1834, when the class one dollars were struck.
This coin was made a quarter-century later, by a group of enterprising coiners who had decided to go into the rarities business. In addition to making a new die, these midnight coiners had to have stock on which to use it. Instead of following the usual procedure of rolling out a strip of metal to the correct thickness, then blanking it to the correct size-a difficult and expensive process, they decided to start with an existing coin and overstrike it with the new die. That way the new coin would be of about the right weight and thickness. This coin shows traces of the original design: it began its life as a Swiss thaler dated 1857!
When word got out about what was going on, the Mint Director swooped down on the miscreants. All their coins but this one were retrieved and ordered melted down. It remains: a somewhat tarnished, but still legendary rarity.
Theodore Roosevelt met sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the 1890s, when T.R. was an aspiring young politician, and Saint-Gaudens was establishing a reputation as a brilliant artist. When Roosevelt was elected President in 1904 and needed an inaugural medal, he gave the commission to Saint-Gaudens after rejecting the standard, unmemorable medal typically produced for this occasion by the United States Mint.
Saint-Gaudens's results shattered precedent. The piece was modern in all senses of the word. There was no attempt to beautify or romanticize the President's head on the obverse, yet the image clearly conveyed vision and power. The reverse was, if anything, even more groundbreaking. The magnificent, left-facing eagle epitomized authority and presence, while displaying a classical ancient style. (The same eagle is used on the Saint-Gaudens $10 in 1907). This bird unquestionably ruled all it surveyed.
Saint-Gaudens's success with this medal convinced Roosevelt that the artist was the partner he needed to collaborate on a pet project: the redesign of America's money. Saint-Gaudens signed on, and the plotting began. But the potential for trouble hovered on the horizon: this medal had been struck, not by the United States Mint in Philadelphia, but by Tiffany & Company in New York. If the Mint hadn't produced Saint-Gaudens's medal, would it agree to produce any of his coins?