Week Fifteen

 

Coin of the Week: Augustus Saint-Gaudens Commemorative Coin (Tuvalu)

Sculptor/Coin Designer/Artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens has been mentioned in my blog a couple times before. But I never created a coin to celebrate him, and the island nation of Tuvalu has beat me to it. Nuts!

This coin features the standard portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on the obverse, while the reverse shows a picture of Saint-Gaudens, and a small cameo of his most famous design, the 1907 Ultra High Relief Double Eagle. This coin is making it’s first sales a the ANA’s World’s Fair of Money, and is the first in a series called the Designers of America’s Coins that will be continued into future years celebrating awesome U.S. Coin Designers. Made with one oz. of .999 silver, this coin is sure to be a sellout, and a popular commemorative in the years to come.

 

Rooting Through the Lost Art: The Washington Quarter

This is perhaps the least organized section in my entire blog. I get to show you the designs that were proposed for the Washington Quarter, and you get to decide which designs are your personal picks. If you were the big shot, would the design have been different? First, the decided design:

 

And now, the runners-up…

 

 

 

 

 

 

So what would you have picked?

 

Note: The Second Runner-Up Design was used on a coin celebrating the death bicentennial of George Washington, pictured below.

 

 

 

Making a Mint: Carson City

The Carson City, Nevada Mint has a rich history that starts with the discovery of tons of silver called the Comstock Lode. The silver overload was helpful when it came to striking coins, and so a branch mint was opened there. Coins struck at Carson City bear a “CC” mintmark, but are actually quite uncommon. The bulk of coinage production still came from the mints at Philadelphia and San Francisco. Almost every denomination of coin from the dime to the double eagle was produced at Carson City, but when the silver and gold rushes ended, so did most of production. Almost no CC silver dollars are priced below $100, and a good quantity of all rare U.S. coins are from Carson City. The mint formally stopped production in 1893, was used as an assay office until 1933, and today it is the house of the Nevada State Museum. Commemorative medallions are still struck there with the CC mintmark with one of the original presses.

Carson City Mint