American Liberty 225th Anniversary High Relief Gold

On April 2, 1792, Congress passed the Coinage Act and built the nation's first mint in Philadelphia — the first federal building raised under the new Constitution. That single law gave the young United States its own money. Two hundred and twenty-five years later, in 2017, the Mint decided to throw itself a birthday party in gold.

The result was the American Liberty 225th Anniversary Gold Coin: a $100 coin holding one full ounce of pure gold. It was a commemorative — a coin made to honor an occasion rather than to jingle in a pocket — and the occasion was the Mint's own long history.

But the coin became famous for the figure on its face. For more than two centuries, Liberty on American coins had been a classical ideal: a stately woman, usually read as white, borrowed from Greek and Roman art. Here, for the first time, the Mint deliberately portrayed Liberty as a young African American woman wearing a crown of stars. The choice drew praise and pushback in equal measure, and it put a quiet question on a piece of gold: who, exactly, does "Liberty" look like?

The obverse — the heads side — shows Liberty in profile, youthful and self-possessed, her hair crowned with stars. Around her run the words LIBERTY and IN GOD WE TRUST, with the dates 1792 and 2017 binding the Mint's beginning to its 225th year. It was designed by Justin Kunz, an artist in the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program (a roster of outside artists the Mint invites to propose designs), and sculpted into metal by Mint Sculptor-Engraver Phebe Hemphill.

The reverse — the tails side — is all motion: a bald eagle in flight, wings spread, sweeping across the field. It was designed by Chris Costello, also of the Artistic Infusion Program, and sculpted by Mint Sculptor-Engraver Michael Gaudioso.

Two words explain why collectors call this coin special: high relief. Relief is how far a design rises off the flat surface of a coin. Most coins are struck shallow so they stack and wear well. High relief lets the design stand up dramatically, almost sculptural — but it takes far more pressure and more strikes to force the metal into a deep design. The Mint paired that deep relief with a proof finish — coins struck on specially polished dies to give mirror-like fields and frosted, sculpted devices. The 2017 piece was the first high-relief coin the United States ever struck as a proof. Hold one at an angle and the light pools and rolls across Liberty's face the way it never does on an ordinary coin.

This is a one-year, one-mint coin: every example is a 2017 struck at West Point, carrying the W mint mark (a tiny letter showing which Mint facility made it). There is no rare branch-mint version to hunt and no circulating counterpart. So the chase here is not about which coin — it's about how nice a coin, and about its place in a story.

Start with mintage. The Mint authorized up to 100,000 pieces, but demand fell well short of that ceiling — first-day sales were 14,285, and final sales (sources vary on the exact audited figure) landed only around half the cap. That makes it scarcer than its big authorized number suggests, though far from rare among modern gold issues.

Then grade. Coins are graded on a 70-point scale; a flawless proof is PR70 (often written PR70 DCAM — "Deep Cameo," for the strongest mirror-and-frost contrast). High-relief proofs are unforgiving: the deep, sculpted fields show every faint hairline and handling mark, so a perfect 70 is genuinely harder to earn than on a shallow coin. A large share of survivors grade PR69, one point shy of perfect — which is exactly why the gap to PR70 carries a premium. Collectors also chase early-release designations such as First Day of Issue, where a coin was submitted within the first days of sale.

What ultimately makes people chase this coin is the combination: the first-ever U.S. proof high relief, a modern reimagining of Liberty that made national news, and a full ounce of pure gold that gives it a hard floor of bullion value beneath the collector premium. It is a coin that is both an argument and an asset.