The Alabama Centennial Half Dollar — the coin that broke two rules

Alabama turned a hundred years old in 1919, and the state wanted a souvenir worth keeping. The plan was a coin — a half dollar the state could sell above face value, with the profit going to mark the centennial.

Congressman Lilius Bratton Rainey carried the bill. It started as a commemorative quarter, got amended to a half dollar along the way, and became law on May 10, 1920, when President Woodrow Wilson signed it. The state's centennial commission would buy the coins from the Mint at face value, then sell them to the public for a dollar each — the gap was the fundraiser.

The coins arrived late, but they arrived in style. President Warren G. Harding came to Birmingham on October 26, 1921, and the half dollars went on sale to the crowd that day. The coin you can hold today was, for a few thousand buyers, a literal memento of the day a sitting president came to town.

The Mint handed the work to Laura Gardin Fraser, and with that she became the first woman to design a coin for the United States — and, by most accounts, the first to design a circulating-style coin for any country. Her husband, sculptor James Earle Fraser (the man behind the Buffalo nickel), sat on the federal Commission of Fine Arts that vetted coin designs, and he recommended her for the job.

The obverse — the "heads" side — carries two overlapping portraits, what numismatists call jugate busts. In front is Thomas E. Kilby, Alabama's governor in 1919; behind him, William Wyatt Bibb, the state's very first governor back in 1819. Twenty-two stars ring the figures, because Alabama was the 22nd state to join the Union.

Putting Kilby there broke the second rule. He was alive — and no living person had ever appeared on a circulating-style US coin before. An 1866 law was read by many to forbid exactly that, and the choice drew grumbling at the time. Kilby went on the coin anyway. The reverse — the "tails" side — adapts the Alabama state seal: an eagle on a shield, gripping a ribbon that reads HERE WE REST, the state's motto of that era.

Here's the clever part. Sales of these fundraiser coins often stalled, so James Earle Fraser suggested a fix: stamp a small mark on some of the coins, and collectors who wanted a "complete" set would have to buy both kinds. The mark chosen was a sunken "2x2" in the right field, above the stars — the two 2's for the 22nd state, the X standing in for the diagonal St. Andrew's cross from Alabama's flag. (It is not a multiplication sign, even though it reads like one.)

It worked. The 2x2 became the scarcer, more sought-after coin, and it still carries a premium over the plain version today — typically running noticeably higher in collector grades. The plain variety is the more available of the two: 64,038 were struck, around 5,000 went back to the Mint unsold and were melted, leaving roughly 59,000 in collectors' hands.

The 2x2 mintage is where the honesty has to come in. The long-standing catalog figure is 6,006 struck (six held back for the annual Assay Commission). But numismatists don't fully agree — published research has put the real 2x2 figure anywhere from about 5,000 to 15,000-plus, each side making a fair case. Treat 6,006 as the traditional number, not a settled one. Either way, this is a genuinely scarce coin, and a sharply struck, high-grade example of the 2x2 is a real prize.