Trygve A. Rovelstad

Trygve A. Rovelstad spent his whole life within reach of one Illinois river — and one idea.

Born in Elgin, Illinois, on September 27, 1903, to Norwegian immigrant parents, he showed a gift for art early. He studied at the Fabyan estate studio in nearby Geneva, then apprenticed under Lorado Taft, one of America's most celebrated sculptors, while taking classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. He went on to the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York. Strong training for a small-town kid — and he carried it home rather than away.

By the early 1920s, still in his teens, Rovelstad had fixed on the project that would shadow the rest of his life: a monumental bronze memorial to the pioneers who settled the Fox River valley. Everything else he made — the medals, the busts, the coin — was in some sense a way of getting that memorial built.

Rovelstad worked in relief — the art of raising a figure out of a flat surface so it reads almost like sculpture you could touch. It is the exact skill a coin or a medal demands, and it became his trade. He designed coins and medals for the U.S. Mint, the State of Illinois, and others, modeling figures that had to stay legible when shrunk to the width of a thumbnail.

His widest reach came not from art galleries but from the U.S. Army. As a medalist sculptor for the War Department during World War II, Rovelstad designed decorations that millions of service members would wear. Among his credited works: the Combat Infantryman Badge — the silver rifle-on-a-blue-bar that marks a soldier who has fought on the front line — along with the Bronze Star Medal and the Legion of Merit. Few Americans know his name; a great many have saluted his work.

Then there was the coin. Rovelstad designed both faces of the 1936 Elgin, Illinois, Centennial half dollar. The obverse — the heads side — is a bearded pioneer in profile. The reverse — the tails side — is a pioneer family: four adults and a baby, pressing west across the prairie. That reverse was no abstraction. It was a small-scale study for the very statue he was trying to fund. He was, in effect, putting his unbuilt monument into a few hundred thousand pockets.

Here is the part that makes Rovelstad worth a stranger's attention.

The Great Depression had killed any hope of public money for his memorial. So Rovelstad did something unusual: he turned to the coinage. With Elgin's centennial approaching, Congress authorized a commemorative half dollar — and the plan was to sell the coins above face value, with the profit going toward the bronze. The Medallic Art Company of New York reduced his models to working dies, and in October 1936 the Mint struck the coins. Of 25,000 made, about 20,000 reached buyers; the remaining 5,000 went back to be melted.

The catch was simple and human. The coins were offered at a dollar each — and, as the local history dryly records, "not many people were willing to pay a dollar for a fifty cent piece." The fund came up short. The statue stalled.

Rovelstad never gave it up, but he never saw it finished either. He died in 1990. His Pioneer Family Memorial was finally cast and dedicated in his hometown in 2001 — sixty-five years after the coin meant to pay for it, and more than a decade after his death. Today his half dollar sits in collections as one of the more affordable "classic" U.S. commemoratives, and quietly tells the story of the monument it was supposed to buy.