David Parsons

David Goode Parsons was born in Gary, Indiana, on March 2, 1911. He trained as a sculptor and illustrator — first at the Art Institute of Chicago, then at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a master's degree in arts and education. In the spring of 1936 he was still a Wisconsin student, and that is the moment a coin found him.

Wisconsin was turning a hundred. To mark the centennial of the Wisconsin Territory, the state's celebration committee won approval for a commemorative half dollar — a special coin struck in real silver to honor an anniversary, not for everyday change. The committee picked a local artist to design it. They picked Parsons.

He went on to a long working life as a sculptor and teacher. He kept a studio in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and later moved south to become a professor of art at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He died in Gualala, on the northern California coast, on February 5, 2005, at ninety-three. His papers — correspondence, writings, an essay he titled "The Creative Process" — are preserved at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.

The brief Parsons received was specific. The committee wanted the Wisconsin territorial seal on one side and a badger — the state animal, and Wisconsin's old nickname — on the other. He modeled both.

The models — the large sculpted versions an artist makes before a coin is reduced to its tiny finished size — never made it to the dies. The U.S. Bureau of the Mint judged them poorly executed and struck in too high a relief, meaning the raised design stood up too far from the coin's surface to strike cleanly or stack in a roll. The Mint rejected them. The Treasury sent the problem to the Commission of Fine Arts, the body that vets U.S. coin art, and the Commission brought in a New York sculptor, Benjamin Hawkins, to produce models that would actually strike. Hawkins delivered finished work in early June 1936; it was approved within days.

The finished coin is the one collectors hold today. The obverse — the front, or heads side — shows a muscular forearm gripping a pickaxe over a small mound of ore, an image lifted from the Wisconsin territorial seal that nods to the 1820s lead mining that first drew settlers to the region. The reverse carries a badger standing on a log, with three arrows and an olive branch behind it — the arrows for the Black Hawk War between settlers and Native peoples, the olive branch for the peace that followed. Only about 25,000 were struck.

Here is the honest part. Both Parsons and Hawkins are credited on the coin, but the numismatic historian Don Taxay argued the joint credit flattered the truth: Hawkins, he wrote, didn't work from Parsons's drawings at all — he went back to the territorial seal himself, and his badger was a completely different animal from Parsons's. Taxay's read was that centennial committees liked to "associate their work with local artists," so the student's name stayed on. Whatever the exact division of hands, the coin is the only one Parsons is tied to — and the only national stage his sculpture ever reached, even if another artist's chisel did the final cutting.

His later work surfaces here and there in the record — he designed the 1968 Houston Distinguished Visitors Medal, fitting for a Rice professor — and he appeared in editions of Who's Who in American Art from 1937 into the 1950s. But it's the Wisconsin half dollar, and the tangle behind it, that keeps his name in the coin books.