Gutzon Borglum

John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was born in 1867 in St. Charles, in what was then Idaho Territory, the son of Danish immigrants. He grew up in the American West and trained as an artist on two continents — first at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco, then in Paris, where from 1890 to 1893 he studied at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts.

Paris changed him. He came to know Auguste Rodin, the towering French sculptor, and absorbed Rodin's habit of letting light and rough texture do the work — figures that seem to surface out of unfinished stone rather than sit cleanly on top of it. You can see it for the rest of his career.

Back in America, Borglum built a reputation on a grand scale. His marble Head of Abraham Lincoln (1908) — carved so the president's face emerges from a raw block — was placed in the US Capitol. He made the Seated Lincoln in Newark (1911) and the sprawling Wars of America group there (1926). But scale kept pulling him bigger, toward the side of actual mountains. That ambition gave us his coin. It also gave us his most public disaster.

In 1915 Borglum was hired to carve a colossal Confederate memorial into the granite face of Stone Mountain, near Atlanta. To pay for it, Congress in 1924 authorized a commemorative half dollar — and Borglum designed it. That is his one US coin.

The 1925 Stone Mountain half dollar carries his sculptor's eye on a thirty-millimeter canvas. The obverse — the heads side — shows Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on horseback, the kind of muscular, motion-filled relief (the raised design that stands up off the coin's flat field) Borglum built monuments out of. The reverse turns to an eagle perched on a mountain crag against a field of stars, ringed by the inscription "MEMORIAL TO THE VALOR OF THE SOLDIER OF THE SOUTH." The Philadelphia Mint struck it in 90% silver.

Then it fell apart. By early 1925 Borglum and the monument association's leadership were at war — over money, over technical control, over their tangled and ugly ties to the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. (The Klan was a backer of the Stone Mountain project; Borglum himself was deeply involved in Klan politics in these years, though no proof of formal membership survives — a fact the site states plainly rather than softens.) In February 1925 the association fired him. On his way out, Borglum destroyed his clay and plaster models for the carving. Georgia sought to jail him for it; he slipped across the state line into North Carolina and kept going.

Everything he had actually cut into the mountain — the head of Lee — was later blasted off the granite by the men who replaced him. The carving on Stone Mountain today is not his. The coin, oddly, is the most durable thing to survive his Stone Mountain years intact.

He was not done with mountains. In 1927 South Dakota commissioned him to carve Mount Rushmore. He worked on it for the rest of his life and died in 1941, in Chicago, months before it was finished. His son Lincoln completed it.

The Stone Mountain Memorial half dollar is the one piece of US circulating-format coinage Borglum put his name to — and it carries a story far bigger than its silver. Struck only in 1925 at Philadelphia, it was a fundraiser: each coin was sold above face value to bankroll the carving. Congress authorized up to five million; about 2,310,000 were struck, and after melting the unsold remainder, 1,314,709 were distributed.

For the full design, mintage breakdown, key sale varieties, and what grades collectors chase, see the series page.