The York County, Maine Tercentenary Half Dollar

In 1936, the United States struck a silver half dollar to celebrate the 300th anniversary of one county in Maine. Not a state. Not a battle. A county — York County, the oldest and southernmost in Maine, founded in 1636.

That sounds like a small thing to put on a national coin. It was. But 1936 was the year the rules of common sense seemed to lapse. Congress authorized more than a dozen new commemorative half dollars that year, for events of ever-shrinking importance — town anniversaries, local fairs, a Rhode Island settlement, an Arkansas centennial, an Albany charter. Collectors at the time joked that you could soon get a coin struck for a county picnic. The York County half dollar is one of the children of that craze.

Here is how it worked, and why it bred so many coins. Congress would authorize a commemorative, and the U.S. Mint would strike it — but a local committee bought the entire run at face value and sold it to the public at a markup. The profit funded the celebration. That made a commemorative coin a fundraising tool, and once enough towns figured that out, the requests poured in. The bill for the York County coin sailed through Congress without opposition and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it on June 29, 1936.

The man behind it was Walter H. Rich, a Portland, Maine artist. He designed both faces of the coin himself — unusual, since most commemoratives of the era were handed to professional sculptors. The modeling and die work were finished by outside firms, but the conception was Rich's.

The obverse — the "heads" side — shows Brown's Garrison, an early fortified settlement on the Saco River. Wooden palisade walls, sentries standing guard, one of them mounted on horseback, and behind it all a rising sun with the word LIBERTY set among its rays. It was only the third U.S. coin ever to show a horse, after the 1900 Lafayette dollar and the Stone Mountain half dollar.

The reverse — the "tails" side — carries the official seal of York County: a heraldic shield with a cross, a Maine pine tree, and the anniversary dates flanking it, ringed by the words YORK COUNTY MAINE and the motto-like line marking it as the first county in the state. That cross is a genuine rarity in American coinage — only one other U.S. coin, the 1934 Maryland Tercentenary half dollar, carries a cross, and both come from the colonial seals they reproduce.

Critics of the day were not kind. The dealer B. Max Mehl said in 1937 that the design "reminds me more of a medal than coin," and later writers called the rendering of the fort amateurish. The newcomer doesn't need to agree. The coin has a folk-art directness — a frontier fort, a county shield — that reads less like a Renaissance medal and more like the place it came from.

There is only one coin to chase here. The York County half dollar was struck in a single year, at a single mint, with no mint mark and no major varieties. That simplicity is part of its charm — you are not hunting a date set, you are hunting one coin in the best condition you can find.

What makes this issue unusual among 1930s commemoratives is how honestly it was handled. The authorizing law allowed up to 30,000 coins, but only 25,000 were struck for sale — and the remaining 5,000 were simply never made. There was no scheme to mint and re-mint the coin in different years to manufacture artificial rarities, the trick that inflated the mintage lists of several other 1936 issues. The York committee, led by numismatist Walter P. Nichols, sold the coins straight.

It sold them slowly, too. Sales stalled in 1937 with thousands still unsold, and the committee held the leftovers for years; the last of the inventory wasn't cleared out until the 1950s. Because so many went to Maine collectors who kept them carefully, and because the run was small to begin with, the survivors tend to be well preserved. The coin is genuinely scarce in the absolute top grades — a "grade" is the 1-to-70 scale that measures how close to perfect a coin's surfaces are — and prices climb steeply for the finest examples, but a solid uncirculated piece remains one of the more attainable classic commemoratives.