Henry Augustus Lukeman

Henry Augustus Lukeman was a monument man. He thought in bronze giants and granite cliffs, not in pocket change — which makes the one coin he designed all the more surprising.

He was born in Richmond, Virginia, on January 28, 1871, but spent nearly his whole life in New York City. (A few sources give his birth year as 1872; the encyclopedias and his Smithsonian papers settle on 1871.) As a boy he worked as a studio assistant to the sculptor Launt Thompson, then studied at the National Academy of Design and, briefly, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguière. The training that shaped him most came back home: he spent years as an assistant to Daniel Chester French, the sculptor who would later carve the seated Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial. Working at French's bench taught Lukeman to think in relief — how a figure can be felt in shallow, raised metal rather than carved fully in the round. That instinct is exactly what coin design demands.

What he built on his own was large and public. Manu, the Law Giver of India on a New York courthouse. A memorial fountain to Ida and Isidor Straus, the couple who went down together on the Titanic. An equestrian Kit Carson in Trinidad, Colorado. He died in New York on April 3, 1935 — the year his one coin was at the center of a national fight he never lived to see end.

Lukeman is remembered for two very different kinds of work, and the line between them is where people get him confused.

The first is Stone Mountain in Georgia — the largest bas-relief carving in the world, cut directly into a granite dome. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum (later of Mount Rushmore) began it, then quarreled with the memorial association and left in 1925. Lukeman was hired to take over. He blasted away Borglum's start and re-laid the design at a grander scale, carving the Confederate figures of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis on horseback. The work stalled in the Depression and was only finished, to an edited version of his plan, decades after his death.

The second is the Daniel Boone Bicentennial half dollar of 1934 — the only U.S. coin Lukeman designed. It was authorized in May 1934 to mark the 200th anniversary of the frontiersman's birth. The obverse — the heads side — carries a left-facing portrait of Boone in buckskins. The reverse shows Boone standing with Chief Black Fish of the Shawnee, a stockade behind them and the sun rising, with the words PIONEER YEAR. It is a quiet, dignified little coin. What happened to it was not quiet at all.

The Boone half dollar became one of the most notorious commemoratives ever struck. Because the design kept the date "1934" frozen on it even as production rolled into later years, the Boone Bicentennial Commission's secretary, C. Frank Dunn, persuaded Congress in 1935 to add a small "1934" to the reverse — creating instant scarce varieties. Then the commission struck tiny quantities at the Denver and San Francisco mints (just 2,003 and 2,004 of the 1935 "small 1934" pieces) and sold them in sets at marked-up prices to dealers and speculators. Collectors who ordered were left empty-handed. The episode helped sour the public on commemoratives entirely and led, years later, to Congress shutting the program down. Lukeman made an honest portrait; the men who sold it made the scandal.