Mint and adopted the dollar as the standard monetary unit. coins have changed many times since the Coinage Act of 1792 established the U.S. The coin depicts Jefferson facing forward and marks the first time a presidential bust on a circulating American coin has not been shown in profile.U.S. New images of Jefferson also appeared, and the current coin features a new front designed by Jamie Franki based on a Rembrandt Peale portrait. The buffalo also returned to the coin’s reverse in a 2005 edition.
#Us coins nickel series
To commemorate the bicentennial of both the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the nickel underwent its first facelift in 66 years in 2004 when two new designs were used on the back as part of the United States Mint’s Westward Journey series of nickels. The reverse featured Jefferson’s home, Monticello. Schlag based his left-facing profile of the third president in period coat and wig on the marble bust sculpted by Frenchman Jean-Antoine Houdon. It staged a public competition for the coin’s redesign, and German immigrant Felix Schlag bested 390 artists to win the competition and the $1,000 prize in 1938. Although Fraser grew up where the buffalo roamed, the model for the great beast of the West was reportedly “Black Diamond,” the largest bison in captivity who grazed in more urban surroundings at New York’s Central Park Zoo.Īs the bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson’s birth approached, the Treasury Department decided to honor him on the nickel. On the back of the “Buffalo Nickel” was a mighty bison. For the front, Fraser sculpted the head of a Native American, which he said was a composite based on models that included Chief Iron Tail of the Lakota Sioux and Chief Two Moons of the Cheyenne. The next overhaul of the nickel came in 1913 when James Earle Fraser, a student of famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens who grew up on the prairie, designed a coin that celebrated the American West. Only months after the nickel’s introduction, the rays were removed.
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The August 1866 edition of the American Journal of Numismatics referred to it as “the ugliest of all known coins,” which was actually a kinder assessment than that rendered by a reader in the following month’s issue who wrote, “The motto ‘In God we Trust’ is very opportune, for the inventor of this coin may rest assured that the devil will never forgive him.” For some, the stars and bars on the “Shield Nickel” evoked the Confederate “Stars and Bars” flag, and the intricate design caused production problems as the hard metal damaged the dies used in the minting process. The approved design-with a Union shield surrounded by laurel wreaths on the front and a large numeral “5” surrounded by 13 stars and bands of rays on the back-hardly received praise itself. Several designs were proposed for the original nickel, including one with a bust of Abraham Lincoln that was rejected out of concern that it wouldn’t be particularly popular in the South. Not surprisingly, Wharton ultimately made plenty of coin from the new coin, so much so that in 1881 he donated money to establish the first business school in the United States-the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Wharton’s friends in Congress not only agreed to the proposal on May 16, 1866, but even increased the weight of the new five-cent coin so that it required even more nickel. He had taken over a nickel mine outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1863, and refined the metal at his American Nickel Works in Camden, New Jersey. Of course, the businessman had just a bit of a vested interest in the issue considering that he held a virtual monopoly on the production of nickel in the United States. Wharton doggedly lobbied his many friends in Congress to begin striking a second five-cent coin made from nickel. As American industrialist Joseph Wharton argued, by using cheaper nickel and copper, the new five-cent coins could be bigger than the half-dismes. The small silver coins were difficult enough to keep track of in good times, let alone when they began to vanish from circulation.