The Lafayette Dollar: the coin struck in 1899, dated 1900

In 1899 the United States wanted to thank France — and it reached for a dead hero to do it.

The hero was the Marquis de Lafayette, the young French aristocrat who had crossed the Atlantic at nineteen to fight in the American Revolution, become a near-son to George Washington, and helped pull France into the alliance that won the war. A century later, the U.S. was invited to take part in the 1900 Paris Exposition — the great World's Fair — and decided the right gesture was a monument: a bronze statue of Lafayette on horseback, given to the city of Paris.

Statues cost money. So Congress turned the monument into a coin. On March 3, 1899 it authorized 50,000 silver dollars for the Lafayette Memorial Commission, which would sell them to the public at $2 apiece — double face value — and pour the proceeds into the statue fund. Part of the campaign ran through the nation's schoolchildren, who gave to the monument fund as a civics lesson in Revolutionary history. It was a brand-new idea in American money: a coin sold above its value to pay for something.

That made the Lafayette dollar the first U.S. commemorative silver dollar — the start of a tradition that runs to this day.

The Mint's Chief Engraver, Charles E. Barber, designed both sides. The obverse — the "heads" side — shows the conjoined busts of Washington and Lafayette, facing right. Barber drew Washington from Jean-Antoine Houdon's famous bust and Lafayette from an 1824 French medal. The reverse carries the equestrian statue of Lafayette, modeled on the preliminary design by sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett — whose name is inscribed on the statue's base. (Bartlett's bronze was finished in 1908; for decades it stood near the Louvre before being moved to the banks of the Seine.)

The coin holds a clutch of American firsts. It was the first official U.S. coin to depict a president — Washington — and, because Lafayette appears as a bust on the front and on horseback on the back, the first U.S. coin to show the same person on both sides.

Then there's the date. Every Lafayette dollar reads 1900 — yet not one was struck in 1900. All 50,026 pieces were coined in a single day: December 14, 1899, the hundredth anniversary of Washington's death. Federal law barred putting any date on a coin other than its year of striking, so Treasury officials performed a neat sidestep: they declared that "1900" was not a date of coinage at all, but part of the inscription — a reference to the Paris Exposition. It is one of the rare U.S. coins whose stamped year is, by design, not the year it was made.

The very first coin off the press was placed in an ornate presentation casket — said to have cost around $1,000 — and shipped to France, where it was presented to President Émile Loubet. The coin and its casket are recorded as residing in the Louvre.

The Lafayette dollar is a one-year, one-design type: there is only one to own. That simplicity is part of its appeal — and part of its difficulty.

Sales disappointed. The $2 price was steep, the public was lukewarm, and by 1903 leftover coins were trading on the secondary market near a dollar — below what buyers had paid. The Treasury eventually melted 14,000 unsold pieces, leaving a net of roughly 36,026. That melt is why the coin is scarcer than its original 50,000 authorization suggests.

There are no mint marks and no date varieties to chase here, but there is depth for the specialist: numismatic researchers have catalogued several obverse die combinations from the day's striking, with two combinations accounting for the great majority of survivors. The real chase is condition. Because these dollars were sold as keepsakes and handled, then stored loose, pristine high-grade examples are genuinely scarce — and the gap between a worn coin and a gem is enormous. A single example graded MS-67 is reported to have sold in 2015 for over $73,000, against a few hundred dollars for a circulated piece. The story is the same as with most early commemoratives: the design is common, but the grade is rare.