The Columbian Half-Dollar

This month’s edition of Archaeology magazine has arrived, and in flipping through it an advertisement caught my eye.  It was an ad for a coin, which usually gets ignored, but this time it wasn’t some private-issue investment-grade metal nor some ‘clad’ reproduction.  Burnsville, MN company GovMint.com was offering over a thousand Columbian Half-Dollars, bought from a collector in Texas, all in excellent collectible condition.   It appears, if they can be believed, that these are the real deal, actual century-old silver coins minted for the Columbian Exposition.

Considering all the coins jingling around in people’s pockets, the average person might forget that coins have only recently been engraved with the heads of real people.   People did appear on coins, but their appearance was allegorical and not intended to be a real person.   It wasn’t until 1892 that a legal-tender silver U.S. coin would bear the image of a real person — and he wasn’t even American.   Chicago had been successful in their lobbying to host the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a huge fair commemorating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the Americas.   In order to help defray the costs of setting up and operating such an immense undertaking, the U.S. Government pledged $2.5 million in commemorative silver coins to the Exposition.   The bill authorizing the coins, approved in August 1892, declared five million of these half-dollars would be minted and delivered to Chicago, to be used to fund the Expo.   The Exposition had planned on opening in 1892, but was running behind schedule, and the Mint hadn’t any designs for the coin yet, so only 950,000 were produced in 1892, and the rest in 1893.   Columbus himself, obviously, would be displayed on the coin’s obverse.

The first problem: no authenticated portraits of Christopher Columbus are known to exist, so somebody had to come up with  a bust of the explorer.  Sculptor U.S.J. Dunbar was first tapped to design the obverse, and he delivered a design based on the Lotto painting of Columbus (top at left).   Chief Engraver Charles Barber rejected the design, according to  The New York Times that the face wasn’t in line with the generally accepted image of Columbus.   The Times reported that a version of Suardo’s Columbus (center, left) would be used, but in the end Barber based his Columbus profile on a bust of the explorer carved by sculptor Olin Levi Warner.    Barber turned over the design of the reverse to his assistant, George Morgan, who adorned the coin with the Santa Maria and a small map of the world below. 100 of the 1892 version of the coin were struck as proofs, along with the 400th, 1,492nd, and 1,892nd coins minted – those last three coins were held by the Chicago Historical Society and remained sealed until the 1970s.   The rest of the proofs, along with an unknown number of 1893 proofs, were given away or sold and many bear the wear of circulation.

The coins were sold to Expo-goers for $1 each, a 100% markup, which was also a large part of the average person’s paycheck.  Still, hundreds of thousands were sold as keepsakes, and due to their legal-currency status many were also deposited by the Exposition with banks as collateral or payment on loans.   By the end of the Expo, only two million of the coins were distributed, and the rest were returned to the Mint to be melted down.  Coins that had been held in Chicago banks were sold, sometimes en masse, although in rare cases a Columbian silver half-dollar has turned up amongst the regular-issue half-dollars in bank rolls and drawers.  GovMint.com’s stash of a thousand coins, however, is a large pool of the coins to be offered at once (interestingly, Overstock.com also claims to have a stash for sale), and provides an opportunity for most anyone interested in obtaining one of these coins to purchase one.   My first concern, however, is that they do not give information on any single coin, leaving you at the random whim of the shipper when sending out your purchase.   Still, properly graded and mounted coins are all over the place in price, anywhere from $50 to hundreds, which doesn’t provide a very good idea of the correct current market price, which makes the under-$30 proces of GovMint and Overstock an appealing deal.