The Texas Centennial Half Dollar

In 1836 a few thousand Texans broke away from Mexico and made their own republic. A hundred years later, Texas wanted to throw itself a party — and it needed money to do it.

So Texas turned to a trick that was wildly popular in the 1930s: the commemorative coin. Congress could authorize a special half dollar, the Mint would strike it at face value, and a sponsor could then sell it to collectors at a markup. The profit funded the celebration. On June 16, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the act — pushed through by Texas Senator Tom Connally and Representative Wright Patman — authorizing up to 1,500,000 half dollars "in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary in 1936 of the independence of Texas."

The coins sold for a dollar each. The extra fifty cents above face value — the surcharge, the markup baked into the price — was meant to fund the Texas Memorial Museum at the University of Texas at Austin. It was history paying for a building about history.

There was just one problem. Texas struck these coins for five straight years, from 1934 through 1938, long after the centennial fever had cooled. Collectors and Texans simply stopped buying. By the end, the Mint had melted down more than half of every coin it made — a quiet admission that the party had run too long.

The coin was the work of Pompeo Coppini, an Italian-born sculptor who had made Texas his adopted home and filled the state with monuments. He designed both sides — and, by one account, charged nothing for the work.

Coppini broke a rule on purpose. On almost every U.S. coin, the eagle lives on the reverse — the tails side. Coppini put it on the obverse (the heads side), perched in front of the five-pointed Lone Star of Texas. It was a statement: this is a Texas coin first.

The reverse is where the drama is. A winged Victory kneels, an olive branch in one hand, the other resting on the Alamo itself. Behind her stand six flags — the famous "Six Flags Over Texas," the six nations that have ruled the land — half-hidden behind a scroll reading "Liberty." Tucked into the clouds beside her are two small portrait medallions: Sam Houston, who won Texas its independence on the battlefield, and Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas" who first brought American settlers in. Along the bottom runs the rallying cry of the revolution: REMEMBER THE ALAMO.

It was a lot to pack onto a 30-millimeter disc. Charles Moore, who chaired the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts — the body that reviews coin and monument designs — called an early version "a perfect hodgepodge." Sculptor Lee Lawrie was brought in to help tidy it up, and a revised design was approved in June 1934. The crowded reverse is, in a sense, the whole point: it tries to tell the entire story of Texas in a single glance.

Here is the quirk that makes this series fun to chase. The first year is by far the most common, and the last year is the rarest — the exact opposite of how most coins age.

The 1934 coin, struck before anyone knew sales would slump, exists in healthy numbers — around 61,000 survived the melting pot. But from 1935 on, Texas issued the coin in matched sets: one each from Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco (the "D" and "S" mint marks — tiny letters showing which mint struck the coin). Each year fewer people bought in, so each year the surviving numbers shrank.

By 1938, the final year, only about 3,700–3,800 coins came out of each mint and stuck around — roughly 11,000 total across all three. That makes the 1938 set the key to the series: the scarcest, most sought-after, and most expensive to complete in high grade. The 1937 issues are the next-scarcest step down.

What collectors prize today is a complete run — every date, every mint mark — in matching, high condition. Because so many of these coins sat untouched in their original holders for decades, a fair number survive in excellent mint state (uncirculated, never spent). But the low-mintage later dates in top grades are genuinely hard to find, and that's where the chase — and the value — lives.