The Delaware Tercentenary Half Dollar

In 1638, two small ships nosed up the Delaware River. The Kalmar Nyckel and the Fogel Grip, sent from Sweden and led by Peter Minuit — the same man who had bought Manhattan for the Dutch a decade earlier — landed at the rocks where Wilmington now stands. The settlers built Fort Christina and called the colony New Sweden. It was the first lasting European foothold on what would become Delaware.

New Sweden was tiny and short-lived. The Dutch absorbed it in 1655, the English took over after that, and the Swedish chapter slid quietly into the footnotes. But the people stayed, and so did their faith. By the late 1690s their descendants had built a stone church in Wilmington — Holy Trinity, known to everyone as Old Swedes — that still holds worship today in the building where it began. That is the rare thread the coin was made to celebrate.

Three hundred years after those ships arrived, Delaware wanted a party. Congress obliged. On May 15, 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an act authorizing "not fewer than 25,000 half dollars" to mark the anniversary — one of dozens of such commemorative coins Congress green-lit in the 1930s, a boom that would later be remembered as the golden age of the classic U.S. commemorative.

The designs came from an open competition. Thirty-eight artists submitted entries, judged by the Mint's chief engraver John R. Sinnock and the sculptor Robert Tait McKenzie. The winner — and the $500 prize — went to Carl L. Schmitz, a German-born American sculptor, who drew both sides of the coin.

The obverse — the "heads" side — shows Old Swedes Church, its stone tower planted firmly at center. The reverse carries the Kalmar Nyckel under sail, the little ship that started it all. (Some collectors think the ship is the more striking image, and the Mint's own paperwork once treated the ship side as the obverse — a small, fitting ambiguity for a coin so unsure of its own date.)

Then there are the dates, which are the coin's signature quirk. The obverse reads 1936. The reverse pairs 1638 and 1938 — the three-century span of the anniversary. And the coins were actually struck in March 1937. One small silver disc, four years deep: the year on it, the year it honors the start, the year it honors the end, and the year it was born. Flanking the ship are three diamond shapes — not for the dates, but for Delaware's nickname, the Diamond State, and its three counties.

This is a one-coin set. There is a single date and a single mint — Philadelphia, with no mint mark — so collectors don't chase rare branch-mint varieties the way they do with some other commemoratives. What you're chasing instead is condition.

About 25,000 were struck and a little over 4,000 came back unsold to be melted, leaving roughly 21,000 in collectors' hands from the start. That's a modest number, but most were carefully kept — these were sold as keepsakes, not spent — so the coin is not rare in worn grades. The premium lives at the top: pieces with sharp, original mint luster and clean fields. Look at the high points of the church tower and the rigging of the ship; those flat areas show wear and contact marks first, and they separate a common example from a prize one.

A practical note on the date. Because the coin says 1936 but was struck in 1937 to mark an anniversary in 1938, you'll see it sold under all three years. They're the same coin. Don't pay a premium because a listing calls it a "1938" — there is only one Delaware Tercentenary half dollar.