Seth G. Huntington

Seth George Huntington never set out to design money. He was an art director at Brown & Bigelow in Minneapolis — at the time one of the largest calendar and advertising houses in the world — when the U.S. Treasury threw the doors open in 1973 and invited the whole country to redraw its own coins.

The occasion was the Bicentennial. America's 200th birthday was coming in 1976, and the Mint wanted the quarter, half dollar, and dollar to carry new reverses — the "tails" side — for the celebration. So it ran an open competition. Anyone could enter. By the deadline, 884 designs had come in.

Huntington's entry was a clean, head-on rendering of Independence Hall — the Philadelphia building where the Declaration of Independence was signed. A panel of expert judges, chaired by sculptor Robert Weinman of the National Sculpture Society, narrowed the field to twelve semifinalists. On March 6, 1974, Treasury picked the winners. Huntington had won the half dollar, and a $5,000 prize. The next morning, Mint Director Mary Brooks unveiled the chosen designs on NBC's Today show.

He was, by then, a man who had already lived several lives. The coin would make him quietly famous to anyone who ever checked their change.

Huntington's training was in commercial art — the discipline of making one clear image carry a whole idea. That is exactly what a coin needs. A coin reverse is a tiny canvas, struck in low relief — the shallow raised sculpture you feel when you run a thumb across the surface. There is no room for clutter. The picture has to read instantly, at arm's length, in dull pocket-worn metal.

His Independence Hall does that. It is a symmetrical, front-on view of the hall and its bell tower — architectural, calm, immediately recognizable. The lettering is arranged around it without crowding: "200 YEARS OF FREEDOM" to the left of the building, "E PLURIBUS UNUM" to the right, "INDEPENDENCE HALL" beneath, and the country and denomination around the rim. Look at the lower-right corner of the hall and you'll find his signature in miniature — the initials "SGH."

It helps to know what his design replaced. The everyday Kennedy half dollar carries Gilroy Roberts's portrait of President John F. Kennedy on the obverse — the "heads" side — paired with a heraldic eagle reverse. For 1975 and 1976, Huntington's hall took the eagle's place, and every coin carried the dual date "1776-1976." Roberts's Kennedy stayed on the front, where it remains today.

A design contest produces a drawing, not a coin. Turning a flat winning sketch into the three-dimensional, struck-metal object in your hand was the Mint's engraving work — sculpting the relief, cutting the dies (the hardened steel stamps that strike each blank). Huntington supplied the vision; the Mint's craftsmen made it bite into metal. That division of labor — outside designer, in-house engraver — is how the Bicentennial coins came to be.

There is a particular romance to the Bicentennial coins, and Huntington sits at the heart of it. The Mint didn't hand the job to a staff sculptor or a famous artist. It asked the public — and three ordinary working artists won. Jack L. Ahr's colonial drummer went on the quarter, Dennis R. Williams's Liberty Bell over the moon went on the dollar, and Huntington's Independence Hall went on the half. For collectors, that open-contest origin is part of what makes these coins feel like the country talking to itself.

The half dollars were struck in staggering numbers in two flavors: ordinary copper-nickel clad for circulation, and a special 40% silver version sold to collectors in Mint and Proof sets. So a Huntington half is both genuinely common in worn pocket grade and genuinely collectible in pristine silver. That range — a coin almost anyone can find, with a design good enough that specialists chase flawless examples — is exactly the kind of story that keeps a designer's name alive.

That he was a Pacific combat veteran who came home, learned his craft on the GI generation's terms, and spent his career drawing calendars only sweetens it. The man who gave the nation its Bicentennial half dollar was, in the end, a working artist from Minnesota who answered an open call.