Edmund J. Senn

Edmund J. Senn enters the record at a single moment — and almost vanishes the instant it passes.

In 1935, a strong-willed El Paso coin dealer named Lyman W. Hoffecker wanted a commemorative half dollar to mark the 400th anniversary of the explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's wanderings across the American Southwest. Hoffecker had the idea, the political muscle to push it through Congress, and a clear picture of what the coin should show. What he did not have was the skill to model it in three dimensions.

He looked east first. By his own account, Hoffecker approached established sculptors — but each wanted too much time, and each wanted the freedom to change his design. Hoffecker wanted neither. So he hired closer to home: Edmund J. Senn, a local sculptor who, in the depths of the Depression, was out of work and on relief. Senn set up in Hoffecker's garage, and Hoffecker, he later admitted, stood over him while he worked.

That is nearly the whole of what survives about Senn. Numismatic references describe him only as "an El Paso, Texas sculptor" — no birth or death dates, no record of his training, no list of other coins or monuments. He is remembered for one job, done well, for which he received no credit on the object itself.

To understand Senn's role, you have to separate two jobs that newcomers often blur.

The designer decides what a coin shows — the cow's head, the yucca, the curving line of the trail. The modeler (or sculptor) turns that idea into a large plaster relief, the master from which the Mint cuts its dies — the hardened steel stamps that strike the coin. The design is the thought; the model is the object. Senn was the modeler.

The design was Hoffecker's, and it leaned on a pun. The obverse — the heads side — carries the head of a cow, because cabeza de vaca means "head of a cow" in Spanish. The reverse — the tails side — sets a blooming yucca over a map of the old trail across the Gulf Coast states. Senn's task, working in mid-July 1935, was to take those ideas and sculpt them into relief convincing enough to mint.

It was not a free hand. When the federal Commission of Fine Arts — the body that reviews U.S. coin designs — examined Senn's first models, it objected to the look of the cow's head and to the way "LIBERTY" sat on a riband. Senn reworked the models, though in the end little about the head changed. He was executing a vision, under a watchful client, against an official critic. That he produced a coin collectors still prize speaks for the skill in his hands, even if the historical record gives him almost nothing else.

The credit went elsewhere. The initials on the coin are LWH — Lyman W. Hoffecker's — tucked at the lower reverse, to the right of the 1935 date. Senn, who only carried out Hoffecker's design, signed nothing. Catalogues today often list the two men together as the coin's engravers, a small, late correction to a name that was once left in the garage.

This is a short page on purpose. Beyond the Old Spanish Trail commission, almost no biographical information about Edmund J. Senn is publicly documented — no dates, no training, no other known works, no portrait. The standard numismatic histories of the coin mention him only in passing, in Hoffecker's own telling. We have set down here exactly what is verifiable and no more. As more comes to light — a census record, an El Paso art notice, a second commission — this page will be expanded.