N.H. man designed $20 gold coin being re-created by mint
CORNISH, N.H.—A $20 gold coin being re-created by the U.S. mint was designed by a New Hampshire man in 1907.
The high-relief Liberty Gold piece was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. A curator hopes the rerelease of the coin will bring more visitors to the American sculptor's former estate in Cornish.
The coin bears the image of a woman holding a branch and a torch on one side. The back features an eagle flying under the sun. The reissued coin will bear the inscription "In God We Trust" above the sun as it did on a 1908 version of the coin.
The design will be featured on a collectible 24-karat coin for sale next year.
"Liberty's torch represents knowledge, and the branch represents victory," said Henry Duffy, curator at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish. "Of course, the knowledge she's spreading is democracy. She's spreading democracy to the world."
Duffy said the mint originally planned to release the coin in 2007, its 100th anniversary, but original molds had been destroyed, which delayed the process.
"In most cases there are dies," Duffy said. "A die is like a mold that is used to stamp out coins and is made of a very hard metal. The dies for Saint-Gaudens' coins don't exist, because when America went off the gold standard in 1933, all gold coins were to be melted down. When they discovered that they didn't have these dies, they had to put this off, and so it's going to be 2009 instead."
The mint plans to test a second variation of Saint-Gaudens' design, the 27-millimeter, ultra-high relief coin with Roman numerals.
President Theodore Roosevelt selected Saint-Gaudens to improve designs on the nation's coins, and the sculptor's first task was redesigning gold coins.
The process of creating Saint-Gaudens' design proved difficult in 1907. The mint's first attempt was a 34-millimeter ultra-high relief coin with Roman numerals. It required the coins to be 'squeezed' into a press and annealed numerous times. The process was impractical for mass production. The 19 or so coins produced are now in private ownership.
The mint's second attempt was a 27-millimeter, ultra-high relief coin with Roman numerals that actually was two $10 Gold Eagle coins melded together. The coins were called Double Eagles and were twice as thick. The mint had no authority to strike coins of this specification in 1907, so it melted all but two or three.
The third attempt -- a high-relief, 34-millimeter coin with Roman numerals -- was a coin with reduced relief that required less metal flow to fill the design and was more practical for mass production. The mint made about 12,000 coins for collectors.
In 1907, another 361,000 coins with Arabic numerals and a lower relief were produced for circulation. The coins are now worth between $10,000 and $20,000, Duffy said.
Production continued until 1932. In 1933, the mint stopped producing the $20 Gold Double Eagle. Duffy said the government thought it had destroyed all the coins, but one showed up about 70 years later and was sold at auction for $7 million.
Since then, 10 more 1933 coins have surfaced, he said. Their owners are trying to get them authenticated.
Duffy said visitors to the historic site often ask how they can acquire one of Saint-Gaudens' coins.
"They're usually disappointed when they found out how much they are," he said.
Duffy hopes the new minting will draw visitors to the estate.
"There's a lot of interesting intrigue and mystery around these coins right now," he said.
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Information from: New Hampshire Union Leader, http://www.unionleader.com
