The 1922 Grant Memorial Gold Dollar

Ulysses S. Grant was born on April 27, 1822, in a small frame house in Point Pleasant, Ohio. A hundred years later, Ohio wanted to throw him a birthday party in gold.

The man had earned the tribute. Grant was the general who won the Civil War for the Union, then served two terms as president during the hard, tangled years of Reconstruction. By 1922 he was firmly an American icon — and a centennial was a chance to honor him and raise money for memorials in his home state.

So Ohio congressman Charles C. Kearns introduced a bill for a commemorative gold dollar. It became law on February 2, 1922, signed by President Warren G. Harding. The act authorized two centennial coins: a silver half dollar and this gold dollar. The catch — and the reason this little coin has a story at all — is that the gold dollar was never meant to spend. It was a souvenir, sold above face value to fund the memorials.

Here is where it gets murky. The proceeds were supposed to build community memorial buildings in Georgetown and Bethel, Ohio, and a highway linking Grant's birthplace to nearby New Richmond. As numismatic historians have noted, those monuments were never built — and where the money went is not clearly recorded. The birthday gift, it seems, got lost on the way to the party.

The coin was sculpted by Laura Gardin Fraser — the first woman to design a U.S. coin, and the wife of James Earle Fraser, who created the Buffalo nickel. She was a major talent in her own right, not a footnote to her husband.

The obverse — the "heads" side — shows Grant in his military coat, modeled on a photograph by the famous Civil War cameraman Mathew Brady. The reverse shows the modest frame house where he was born, tucked among trees. It is a quiet, human design: the soldier-president and the cabin he came from, on a coin smaller than a dime.

Then there is the star. On some of these dollars, a tiny incuse star — pressed into the surface — sits above Grant's name on the obverse. It means nothing. It has no link to Grant, no symbolism, no commemorative purpose. The Grant Centenary Memorial Association asked the Mint to add it to part of the run for one reason: to create a second "variety" so collectors would feel they had to buy both. The star coins were even sold for more.

That makes this one of the franker examples of a recurring problem with 1920s commemoratives — coins designed less to honor history than to be sold twice to the same buyer. Collectors at the time grumbled loudly about it. A century on, the star has become exactly the kind of detail that makes the coin fun to chase.

This is one of the scarcest of the classic U.S. gold commemoratives, and for a good reason: almost none were ever made. Just 5,016 With Star and 5,000 No Star pieces left the Mint — a rounding error next to most circulating coins. Unlike the companion half dollars, the gold dollars effectively sold out; they were not returned and melted in large numbers. So what was struck is roughly what survives.

The two varieties — With Star and No Star — are the heart of collecting this coin. They are otherwise identical, and a complete classic-commemorative set wants both. Despite the original markup on the star coins, the No Star version has often traded at the slightly higher premium in modern markets, depending on grade and demand. Either way, with combined mintage near 10,000, both are genuinely rare.

A few terms worth knowing. Mint State (MS) means a coin that never circulated — never spent, never worn — graded on a 60–70 scale. Because these were sold as keepsakes rather than pocket change, many survive in high grade, but truly pristine examples (MS-66, MS-67) command a strong premium. The incuse star is sunk into the die, so it can be soft or worn on a tired strike — sharpness of that little star is part of what separates a good example from a great one.