The Coinage Act of 1792 named three gold coins after the eagle, the ten-dollar piece, and gave the smallest of them, the quarter eagle, a value of $2.50, a weight of 67.5 grains and a fineness of .9167. Gold coinage had to wait until the officers handling bullion could post the bonds the law required; Congress lowered the amounts in 1794, and the first half eagles and eagles followed in 1795. Quarter eagles came last. The first 66 were delivered on September 21, 1796, and another 897 on December 8, all from obverse dies with no stars around Liberty. A third obverse, with sixteen stars, struck the 432 coins delivered on January 14, 1797.
No document names the designer. The portrait is the capped bust Robert Scot had placed on the gold coins of 1795, and the dies were probably his work, though Wikipedia notes that engraver John Smith Gardner may have cut the reverse. That reverse was new: instead of the small eagle on the first eagles and half eagles, the quarter eagle carried a heraldic eagle adapted from the Great Seal, a year before the eagle adopted the same design. Like the other gold of the period it shows no mark of value.
Depositors of gold wanted larger coins, so the quarter eagle was made only now and then, in lots of a few hundred to a few thousand. Walter Breen thought banks such as the Bank of Pennsylvania ordered them occasionally and then kept them in their vaults. Coinage was not tied to the calendar: some coins struck in 1799 carry the date 1798, none were made in 1800 or 1801, and coins struck in 1803 still bear the date 1802. Output peaked with 6,812 coins dated 1807. The next year John Reich, hired by Mint Director Robert Patterson in 1807, gave the quarter eagle a new design.
Much of this coinage did not survive. As gold rose in value against silver, coins worth more as metal than at face were exported and melted, a process that continued into the early 1830s.
