Lincoln Cent

History

Congress and the Treasury marked the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth by putting his portrait on the cent in 1909, displacing the Indian Head motif that had carried the denomination since 1859. The commission went to Victor David Brenner without a competition: while modeling the Panama Canal Service Medal he asked Theodore Roosevelt to sit for him, showed the president his earlier Lincoln portrait work during those sessions, and was engaged to prepare the coin, with the obverse bust adapted from his 1907 Lincoln medal and plaque. A January 1909 Treasury letter to the editor of The Numismatist reported that Roosevelt had consented to placing Lincoln's head on one of the popular coins and that Brenner had submitted models. The designer's initials at the base of the first reverse drew immediate press and public objection and were removed almost at once, then restored in 1918 in much smaller form on Lincoln's shoulder, where they have remained. Two later interruptions shaped the run: the zinc-coated steel cent of 1943, struck to ration copper for the war, and the replacement of the wheat reverse for Lincoln's sesquicentennial in 1959.

Details

Brenner's obverse has served the entire series without replacement, and he also designed the wheat ears reverse used from 1909 through 1958. Frank Gasparro, then Assistant Engraver, prepared the Lincoln Memorial reverse that debuted in January 1959 and ran through 2008; more than twenty models were prepared by the Mint's engraving staff before the commission and a jury of artists settled on the Memorial. The base alloy was bronze, described as 95 percent copper with the balance in tin and zinc, and the tin was dropped during the war years and again from 1962 through 1982. The 1943 issue was struck in zinc-coated steel at Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco, in excess of one billion pieces, and from 1944 through 1946 the Mint used copper reclaimed from spent shell casings before bronze was restored in 1947. All three of those mints were active across the wheat cent series, San Francisco's output including the 1909-S VDB.

Features

Lincoln faces right on the obverse, the bust taken from Brenner's 1907 medal, with the initials VDB at the base of the shoulder on every coin since 1918. The 1909 VDB cents instead carry those initials in large letters at the base of the reverse, where two wheat heads frame the statutory legends in a heraldic arrangement. Gasparro's reverse centers the Lincoln Memorial with Daniel Chester French's sixty-foot seated statue visible within it, FG at the right of the Memorial's base, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA arcing above and ONE CENT below to nearly close a circle of text inside the raised rim, and E PLURIBUS UNUM above the building with UNUM on its own line. Gasparro explained that placement as fitting what Lincoln aspired to, the unity of the nation, though the low relief needed for high-speed coinage drew criticism that the design was flat and unbalanced. Beyond the 1909-S VDB, which is the rarest regular-issue Lincoln apart from errors, the varieties most often sought are the 1922 Plain and the doubled dies of 1955 and 1972.

Notable facts

• Brenner studied in Paris under the medalist Oscar Roty beginning in 1898, exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, helped found the New York Numismatic Club in December 1908, and died in 1924 at the age of 52.
• Brenner's model was not coinable as delivered, and Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber wrote to him in February 1909 asking for technical adjustments.
• Steel cent production ran from February 1943 through December 31, 1943, after complaints that the coins rusted and were mistaken for dimes; the Acting Secretary of the Treasury filed notice of intent to return to bronze on December 15, 1943, and President Roosevelt signed the authorization three days later.
• Survivor estimates for the 1944 cent struck on a steel planchet range from about 25 to about 75 pieces, with many examples too environmentally damaged to certify.
• Grading services label the 1944 steel error as struck on a steel planchet rather than a 1943 planchet, because the blank may have come from the Belgian 2-franc coinage the U.S. Mint was under contract to strike that year, a piece indistinguishable in composition and weight from the 1943 issue.
• Color designations of Red, Red-Brown and Brown govern value across both the wheat and Memorial series, with no strike designation comparable to full bands or full steps.
• The 1959 Memorial cent was hoarded in quantity and is easy to find in Mint State Red, yet the PCGS population in MS67+RD stood at five as of May 2025, with individual sales at $2,520 in January 2020 and $4,320 in November 2023.