Howard Kenneth Weinman

To grow up as Howard Kenneth Weinman was to grow up inside one of the great workshops of American sculpture. His father was Adolph A. Weinman — the German-born artist who designed the Mercury dime and the Walking Liberty half dollar, two coins so admired that the half dollar's design was revived for the American Silver Eagle decades later. The family studio in New York was a place where national medals and monuments took shape.

Howard was born in 1901 and became a sculptor too. So did his brother, Robert A. Weinman, who went on to a distinguished career of his own in medallic art. For Howard, though, the public record is quieter. He lived and worked in New York and, in his later years, kept a home and studio in Colchester, Vermont. He died nearby at Milton, Vermont, on March 1, 1976, at the age of seventy-five.

Honesty matters here: relatively little of Howard's life is documented. His exact birthplace and his training are not recorded in the public sources — unlike his brother Robert, whose apprenticeship under their father is well attested. What survives of Howard is mostly the paper trail around a single coin. That is not unusual for the sculptors of the 1930s commemorative era. Many were skilled professionals whose names endure because, once, they fit a story into a circle of silver an inch and a half across.

Designing a coin is not the same as drawing one. The sculptor models the design in relief — shallow, raised forms in clay or plaster, much larger than the finished coin — which a machine then reduces to coin size to make the working dies. Howard worked in exactly this tradition, the one his father had mastered.

The job that defines him came in 1936. Long Island was marking three hundred years since its first European settlement, and Congress authorized a commemorative half dollar. The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts — the federal panel that vets the look of the nation's coins and monuments — recommended Howard for the work, and the tercentenary committee engaged him on that recommendation. By April his father was writing to the Commission about the hiring; by May, Howard had finished his plaster models. The sculptor Lee Lawrie, reviewing them for the Commission, had a few small suggestions but was, by the record, greatly pleased. Brooklyn and Long Island newspapers — the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Long Island Sunday Press — ran photographs of Howard sculpting in his studio that spring.

Howard chose restraint over spectacle. For the obverse — the heads side — he set two profile heads together, jugate, overlapping and facing the same way: a Dutch settler and an Algonquian man of Long Island. He explained the choice plainly. "I shall try to infer by the harmonious balance of the heads," he wrote, "the peaceful settlement of the island by the Dutch." The reverse carries a single clean image — a Dutch three-masted ship under sail. It is a modest, well-balanced design, and it was the only coin he ever saw struck.

One small production detail shows how a coin is a team effort. The motto IN GOD WE TRUST sits low on the reverse, worked into the waves beneath the ship. To keep it legible at coin size, the Mint's chief engraver, John R. Sinnock, cut that lettering directly into the master die rather than leaving it in Howard's plaster — a quiet hand from inside the Mint on a design that is otherwise all Weinman.