The Huguenot-Walloon Half Dollar: a coin for a 1624 voyage, picturing two men who died before it sailed

In 1624 a ship called the Nieuw Nederlandt crossed the Atlantic carrying French-speaking Walloons from what is now Belgium, along with French Huguenots — Protestants fleeing persecution in Catholic Europe. They settled the colony of New Netherland, the territory that would one day become New York. Three centuries later, their descendants wanted a coin to remember them by.

The push came from the Huguenot-Walloon New Netherland Commission, a body organized under the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. Congress agreed without a fight: the authorizing act passed without opposition and President Warren G. Harding signed it on February 26, 1923. It allowed for up to 300,000 silver half dollars.

That last detail — churches sponsoring and selling a federal coin — is what made the project unusual, and what eventually drew fire. A commemorative half dollar in this era worked like a fundraiser: the Mint made the coins, a sponsoring group bought them at face value, and the group resold them to the public at a markup to fund the cause. Here the cause was an explicitly religious anniversary, and that raised eyebrows about church and state long before the coins ever reached a collector's hand.

The obverse — the heads side — shows two men in profile, one behind the other (collectors call this paired arrangement jugate). They are Admiral Gaspard de Coligny and William the Silent, both leaders in the 16th-century Protestant struggle for religious freedom. The reverse — the tails side — carries the ship Nieuw Nederlandt under sail, ringed by the words "HUGUENOT-WALLOON TERCENTENARY · FOUNDING OF NEW NETHERLAND" and the dates 1624 and 1924.

Here is the catch that critics seized on: neither man on the obverse had anything to do with the 1624 voyage. Coligny died in 1572, William the Silent in 1584. Both were gone for forty years or more before the ship sailed. They were chosen as symbols of the Protestant cause the settlers belonged to, not as participants in the event the coin marks.

The designs came from sketches by the Reverend John Baer Stoudt, who chaired the commission. The Mint's Chief Engraver, George T. Morgan — the man behind the Morgan dollar — turned those sketches into the working models, with the renowned sculptor James Earle Fraser, of Buffalo nickel fame, supervising revisions. So the finished coin carries the hand of one of the most famous engravers in American coinage, working from an amateur's drawings.

This is a one-year, one-mint coin — every genuine example is a 1924 Philadelphia strike with no mint mark (the small letter that marks the branch mint of origin; Philadelphia used none in this era). So unlike many series, there are no rare dates to chase. The whole story is about condition.

The Mint struck 142,080 pieces, 80 of them set aside for the annual Assay Commission that tested the coinage. But the commission could not sell them all. About 87,000 went to the public at $1 each, while a large block of roughly 55,000 went unsold and was returned to the Mint — which, rather than melting them, released them into circulation at face value. That partial sell-out is typical of the commemorative boom of the 1920s, when more coins were authorized than the public actually wanted.

Because the coins were sold one at a time to a churchgoing public rather than dumped on dealers, many survived in decent shape — but truly pristine, sharply struck examples are another matter. Value climbs steeply with grade: documented retail in 2018 ran from roughly $125 for a circulated piece up to several hundred dollars for choice uncirculated, and one exceptional specimen brought $15,275 at auction in 2015. As always, the grade on the holder is what moves the price.