John Baer Stoudt

John Baer Stoudt was not a sculptor or an engraver. He was a country preacher with a scholar's obsession — and that obsession ended up on a coin.

Born in 1878 in Maxatawny Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania, Stoudt trained for the pulpit, not the studio. He worked his way through Keystone State Normal School, Franklin and Marshall College, and the Reformed Church's seminary, and in 1908 he was ordained. For the rest of his working life he served Reformed congregations in the Lehigh Valley — first the Salisbury charge near Emaus, then Grace Reformed Church in Northampton.

But preaching was only half of him. Stoudt spent fifteen years walking the Pennsylvania-German countryside, writing down the rhymes, ballads, and old beliefs of his neighbors before they vanished. The Folklore of the Pennsylvania Germans (1916) was one of the first real collections of that vanishing oral world. He wrote constantly — church histories, a study of the inscriptions potters scratched into Pennsylvania-German earthenware, even a book on the Liberty Bell. He died in Allentown in 1944.

The thread that pulled Stoudt onto a coin was his own ancestry. He was descended from Huguenots — French Protestants driven into exile — and he became a leading authority on their history. That made him the natural choice to lead the Huguenot-Walloon Tercentenary, the 1924 celebration of the 300th anniversary of the first Walloon and Huguenot settlers reaching New Netherland in 1624.

Stoudt chaired the commission. And when the commission won approval for a commemorative half dollar, he didn't just commission an artist — he supplied the concept and the sketches himself, and even went before Congress to explain the design. He put two Protestant heroes on the obverse — the heads side — as jugate busts, meaning two overlapping profiles facing the same way: Gaspard de Coligny of France and William the Silent of the Netherlands. The reverse — the tails side — shows the ship Nieuw Nederlandt that carried the settlers across.

An amateur's sketch can't be struck into metal, though. That job fell to George T. Morgan, the Mint's chief engraver — by then in his late seventies and famous as the man behind the 1878 Morgan dollar. Morgan turned Stoudt's drawings into the plaster models the dies were cut from. So the coin carries two hands: the historian who imagined it and the master engraver who made it real.

The design drew fire even at the time. Critics asked why two men who had died roughly forty years before the 1624 voyage belonged on a coin about that voyage — and whether a religious anniversary deserved federal coinage at all. The objections didn't stop it. About 142,000 were struck at Philadelphia in 1924.