Pattern Quarter Dollar

History

The Coinage Act of April 2, 1792 created the quarter dollar as one of ten denominations running from the copper half cent to the gold eagle, fixing it at 104 grains total weight, 0.8924 fine, containing 92-13/16 grains of pure silver. Alexander Hamilton's 1791 report to Congress on establishing a mint led to that legislation and to the experimental coinage struck at Philadelphia in the same year, though no quarter dollar actually reached circulation until the Draped Bust, Small Eagle issue of 1796. Joseph Wright, George Washington's choice as the Mint's first Chief Engraver, cut the 1792 quarter, the only pattern design he ever produced; he is thought to have modeled the head on his wife, Sarah Vandervoort, and both died in the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic in the late summer of 1793, which left the design without a successor. Pattern quarters continued to appear through the nineteenth century as the Mint tested proposals it ultimately declined, including the 1866 quarter struck without the motto IN GOD WE TRUST, one of a trio that also included a half dollar and a silver dollar. The 1872 Amazonian coinage carried its design across the full run of denominations from the quarter dollar to the double eagle.

Details

Spanning more than 120 years of experimental and rejected proposals, the category has no single designer, alloy, weight or diameter, and most issues survive in quantities of one to a few dozen rather than in mintages. Attribution runs on two parallel catalogue systems: the Judd numbers, from Dr. J. Hewitt Judd's United States Pattern, Experimental, and Trial Pieces of 1959, and the Pollock numbers, from Andrew W. Pollock III's United States Patterns and Related Issues of 1994. The 1792 issue that anchors the run was struck at Philadelphia in copper, catalogued as Judd-12 and Pollock-14, and in white metal as Judd-13 and Pollock-15; one white metal specimen has been described as an alloy of 50 percent lead and 48 percent tin. No example is known in silver, despite the pieces having been proposals for a silver denomination. Two copper examples were known by the 1930s, one of them in the Mint Cabinet, while four white metal pieces are recognized today, two of them in museum holdings at the New-York Historical Society and the American Numismatic Society, the latter struck on an oversized planchet.

Features

The 1792 quarter takes its common name, Eagle on Globe, from its reverse device, a design unlike anything the Mint subsequently adopted. The piece states no denomination, which set it apart from the 1792 cents, half dismes and dismes, all of which declared their value, and that silence kept its identity in dispute for a century. R. Coulton Davis's pattern listing, serialized from 1885, grouped it with the 1792 pattern cents; the 1913 Adams-Woodin reference called it a cent outright; Wayte Raymond's 1953 catalogue guessed at a half eagle while conceding how little was known. Pollock's 1994 work listed it as a quarter dollar, and the standard references have followed since. Collectors should know the copper-plated lead casts of the Smithsonian copper example, made in the nineteenth century, which betray themselves through uniformly granular surfaces and a mold seam running perpendicular to the reeding on the edge.

Notable facts

• The Judd numbering system takes its name from Dr. J. Hewitt Judd, an ophthalmologist who served as American Numismatic Association president from 1953 to 1955, and his reference is now in its tenth edition.
• Only two white metal 1792 quarters were known to the hobby until 2002, when two additional examples were recognized in a museum display.
• PCGS values the white metal 1792 quarter at $1,000,000 to $1,400,000, while an example graded NGC EF-45 realized $376,000 in January 2015.
• That same white metal coin brought $28,600 in a November 1988 sale.
• Grading services have split on the strike character of these pieces: one copper 1792 quarter received the numeral 63 from PCGS, NGC and CAC, with NGC calling it MS-63 and PCGS designating it SP-63.
• Don Taxay acquired a white metal specimen during the 1960s for the Chase Manhattan Bank Money Museum, and the coin later passed to the American Numismatic Society, removing it from the market permanently.