Design Reform Patterns (1880-1942)

By 1880 the experiments of the 1870s were winding down. Every pattern dated 1880 repeats a design of 1879: the goloid metric dollars of William Barber and George T. Morgan, struck in Dr. Wheeler Hubbell's alloy of gold, silver and copper, and the four-dollar Stella proposed for an international gold coinage. Goloid was dropped because it could not be told from ordinary coin silver without an assay, and Congress never adopted the Stella.

The next push came from the minor coins. In 1881 Mint Superintendent A. Loudon Snowden had Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber design a matching cent, three-cent and five-cent piece, and Barber's Liberty head of that set became the obverse of the five-cent piece from 1883 to 1913. The 1882 and 1883 patterns test reverses with and without mottoes, a Shield nickel obverse with the ball removed from the base of the shield, and reverses that state their own alloy. When the first 1883 nickels, which lacked the word CENTS, were gold-plated and passed as five-dollar pieces, the Mint added the word. Eastman Johnson's holed cent and five-cent designs followed in 1884 and 1885, and in 1885 the Mint tested a segmented collar that raised E PLURIBUS UNUM on the edge of the silver dollar.

An act of September 1890 let the Mint redesign any coin at once with the Treasury Secretary's approval, and after that only once a design had been in use for 25 years. Mint Director Edward O. Leech's 1891 competition for new silver designs failed, and Barber's own Liberty head dime, quarter and half dollar were approved in November 1891, after a small group of patterns now all in the Smithsonian. The Mint tried new cent and five-cent alloys in 1896.

President Theodore Roosevelt brought in Augustus Saint-Gaudens to redesign the gold. His 1907 eagle and double eagle were modeled in a relief the Mint's presses could not bring up in one blow, and the patterns of 1907 record the attempts: the eagle with periods, the Indian head double eagle, the Ultra High Relief, an eagle-size double-thick piece, and brass trials flattened after striking. Bela Lyon Pratt's quarter eagle and half eagle followed in 1908. Barber made Washington five-cent patterns in 1909 and 1910, and James Earle Fraser's Buffalo nickel was struck in pattern form in January and February 1913.

The silver redesign of 1916 produced Adolph A. Weinman's dime and half dollar and Hermon A. MacNeil's quarter, each with several pattern versions. After 1921 George T. Morgan reworked Anthony de Francisci's Peace dollar to lower its relief, and the 1922 medium relief coins are one of those attempts. The tree ends with the 1942 search for a cent made without copper, when the Mint struck an experimental design in several metals and sent dies to outside firms that made plastic and glass pieces.

Judd numbers, old and new. Judd's United States Pattern Coins gives every die pair a separate number for each metal and edge, and collectors use those numbers as names. The numbers from 1907 on were reassigned in later editions, so the Ultra High Relief once listed as J-1778 is now J-1907, J-1908 or J-1909 by edge, and the 1916 half dollars once numbered J-1797 to J-1801 are now J-1991 to J-1996 in the striking order worked out by Roger Burdette. NumisDex titles follow PCGS, which often gives both numbers ("J-1778/1909"); the page text names the current number.

Other catalogues. Pollock numbers (Pollock-1845 for J-1645) count die and planchet varieties separately, so one Judd number can carry two or three Pollock numbers. The 1942 plastic pieces have Pollock numbers in the 4000s, and Roger Burdette's own numbers (RB 42-70 for the glass cent) appear on some NGC labels.

Metals and edges. The metals run from goloid, copper, aluminum and nickel in the 1880s to bronze, brass, pure nickel and several aluminum alloys in 1896, and to zinc, manganese, lead, plastics, hard rubber and tempered glass in 1942. Edges are plain, reeded or lettered, with two oddities: the 1882 Blind Man's nickels with five raised bars, and the 1907 double eagles whose lettered edge reads with the obverse or the reverse up.

Patterns, trials and errors. USPatterns.com classes each number as an essai (a new design), a die trial (regular dies in another metal), an experimental piece, a fantasy, a private striking or a mint error. Several numbers in this tree are mint errors rather than patterns, among them the 1881 J-1664 and 1884 J-1723a cents on the wrong planchets and the 1909 copper-nickel Lincoln cent J-1930. A few listings, such as J-1727, J-1728 and J-2015, are discredited, and others, such as the 1908 Pratt designs J-1922 and J-1923, have never been confirmed.

Grading. PCGS and NGC grade most pieces as proofs. PCGS grades the 1942 pieces as specimens and NGC as Mint State. Some patterns are known only in circulated grades: USPatterns.com knows both examples of the 1916 dime J-1982 only worn.

1880-1885

• Goloid metric dollars, J-1645 to J-1656, and the four-dollar Stellas in copper and aluminum. The gold strikings are filed with the four-dollar Stellas of 1879 and 1880.
• 1881 five-cent patterns of Barber's minor set, and the 1882 five-cent designs, J-1675 to J-1697, including the Blind Man's nickel J-1697.
• Morgan's Shield Earring set of 1882, in silver and copper: the quarter, the half dollar and the dollar.
• The 1883 five-cent patterns, J-1704 to J-1720, and Eastman Johnson's holed cents of 1884.
• The 1884 copper pieces given to A. M. Smith, including the Morgan dollar, trade dollar and gold dollar, and the 1885 lettered-edge dollars, such as J-1747.

1889-1906

• Barber's 1891 half dollars, J-1762 to J-1766, with the Columbia figure of J-1766.
• The 1896 alloy cents and five-cent pieces, J-1767 to J-1772.
• Barber's 1906 double eagle, J-1773, whose reverse reuses the 1891 Columbia figure.

1907-1913

• Saint-Gaudens's eagles with periods, J-1901 to J-1903.
• The 1907 double eagle patterns: the Indian head J-1905, the Ultra High Relief such as J-1909, and the eagle-size J-1917. Several also appear in the Saint-Gaudens double eagle series.
• Barber's 1909 Washington nickels, J-1933 to J-1939, and the 1913 Buffalo nickel patterns, such as J-1950.

1915-1942

• The Panama-Pacific half dollars and gold dollars without the S, J-1960 to J-1967.
• Weinman's 1916 dimes and half dollars, among them J-1992, and MacNeil's 1916 quarters.
• The 1922 medium relief Peace dollar, J-2020, and commemorative trials from 1918 to 1935.
• The 1942 cent experiments, J-2051 to J-2081, including the glass cent J-2069.

Several groups were made for collectors from the start. USPatterns.com believes the 1885 aluminum strikings from the regular dies, cent to double eagle, were sold to collectors in complete sets, the last year such sets are known. The 1884 copper pieces, quarter through double eagle, went to Jacob Smith, who wrote the Mint's visitor guides as A. M. Smith, and was sold by Bolender in February 1936. USPatterns.com also believes the 1915 Panama-Pacific pieces without the S and the 1916 McKinley gold dollar in nickel were struck for profit.

Many other pieces never left government hands. The Smithsonian holds all the 1891 Barber patterns, the 1906 Barber double eagle, the 1909 and 1910 Washington nickels, two of the 1907 eagle-size double eagles, and examples of the 1913 Buffalo and 1916 silver patterns; the American Numismatic Society holds the lead Indian head double eagle and the 1935-S Boone trial. Of the four round-3 Buffalo patterns of 1913, two went to the Mint collection and two were returned to the Mint.

Some numbers were struck in quantity and then melted. Roger Burdette's research found 31,500 rolled-edge eagles struck in September 1907, of which 31,450 were melted, and up to 2,000,000 high-relief dimes struck in 1916, nearly all melted after the rims proved too thick for telephone coin boxes. USPatterns.com treats only the rolled-edge eagles struck with a special edge collar as true J-1903 patterns, and it knows one J-1984 dime. It recommends metallurgical tests for the 1896 alloy pieces and the 1942 metal cents, whose compositions have never been studied closely.