The 2020 Mayflower $10 Gold Coin

Here is the strange part. The United States did not pass a law to make a Mayflower coin.

In December 2017, Senator Edward Markey and Representative William Keating introduced the Plymouth 400th Anniversary Commemorative Coin Act. It would have authorized the usual three-coin commemorative set — a $5 gold piece, a silver dollar, and a clad half — each carrying a surcharge to fund the anniversary. That's how nearly every modern U.S. commemorative is born: a sponsor, a cause, a bill, a surcharge. The bill went nowhere. It never reached a vote and quietly expired with the 115th Congress.

That should have been the end of it. It wasn't.

The Mint wanted to mark the anniversary anyway, so it used a power it already had. Under 31 U.S.C. §5112(i)(4)(C) — the same standing authority that lets the Treasury Secretary strike gold coins on American Eagle terms — the Mint issued a Mayflower coin on its own initiative. No act of Congress. No surcharge. The companion silver piece couldn't legally be a "silver dollar" (only Congress can authorize that), so it was struck as a medal instead, under the Mint's general authority to make medals (31 U.S.C. §5111(a)(2)).

This is why the denominations look odd if you know your commemoratives. The dead bill proposed a $5 gold coin. The coin that actually appeared is a $10 — because a $10 face value is what the Mint's numismatic-gold law produces for a quarter-ounce piece, not the $5 a commemorative act would have set. The whole program is, in effect, a commemorative wearing a numismatic-gold disguise.

The art tells the story honestly, from both sides of 1620.

The obverse — the "heads" side — does something unusual for a U.S. coin: it centers the people who were already here. A Wampanoag family watches from the edge of the design as the Mayflower arrives from across the sea. A young boy steps onto the rim itself — a deliberate touch, marking the moment two worlds met on the Patuxet homeland. The inscriptions read E PLURIBUS UNUM, PATUXET, and $10. Putting the Wampanoag name PATUXET on the front of a federal coin was a quiet but pointed choice.

The reverse turns to the new arrivals: paired portraits of a Pilgrim man and woman, faces set toward a self-governed future, flanked by a pair of mayflower blossoms. It carries the dates 1620 and 2020, plus PLYMOUTH, IN GOD WE TRUST, the metal mark AU 24K 1/4 OZ., and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

The designs came from Chris Costello, an artist in the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — outside designers brought in to widen the Mint's visual range. The obverse was sculpted into its final relief by Mint medallic artist Phebe Hemphill, the reverse by Joseph Menna. Relief is just the raised-and-recessed depth of the design; turning a flat drawing into that sculpted form is its own craft, and on U.S. coins it's usually a different hand than the one that drew it.

There was a transatlantic twist, too. This was a joint program with the United Kingdom's Royal Mint, marking the same voyage from the port it left. Costello also designed the reverse of the Royal Mint's matching gold coin — so the same artist shaped coins struck on both sides of the Atlantic for the same 400th anniversary.

This is a scarce coin by design, and the format matters more than the date.

There is only one year — 2020 — and one mint, West Point (the small W on the coin). What separates the pieces is finish. The Mint sold a reverse proof version on its own, capped at 5,000 coins. A reverse proof flips the usual look: the raised design is frosted and the background fields are mirror-bright, the opposite of a standard proof. It's a finish the Mint reserves for special issues, and at 5,000 pieces it's one of the lowest-mintage modern U.S. gold coins of its era.

The ordinary proof version is rarer still, but you can't buy it by itself. It came only inside the U.S.–U.K. two-coin gold set, pairing the American $10 with the Royal Mint's matching quarter-ounce gold coin — and the Royal Mint offered just 500 of those joint sets. So the proof Mayflower $10 is effectively a 500-coin coin, locked to its British twin.

For grading, the language collectors use is straightforward: a strike is one stamping of the dies onto a blank, and condition is scored on a 70-point scale, so a flawless modern proof grades PF70 (or PR70). Because these were sold as collector products in 2020 and handled carefully from day one, top grades are common — which means, for this coin, the scarcity story is mostly about how few were made, not how few survived nicely. Watch for "First Strike" or "Early Releases" labels on the holder; those reflect when a coin was submitted for grading, not a different coin or a better strike.