The Jamestown 400th Anniversary Silver Dollar

In May 1607, three small ships dropped anchor on a marshy peninsula in Virginia. About a hundred English men and boys climbed off and started building. They called the place Jamestown, after their king. It was a brutal beginning — disease, starvation, a winter so bad the survivors later called it the "Starving Time" — but it held. Jamestown became the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. Everything that came after, in a sense, started there.

Four hundred years later, in 2007, the U.S. Mint marked the anniversary with this silver dollar. It was not a coin for spending. It was a commemorative — a coin Congress authorizes for a single occasion, sold at a premium to collectors, with part of the price set aside for a cause. Congress passed the law on August 6, 2004 (Public Law 108-289), and the Mint struck the coin during 2007 only. After that, the dies were retired. There is no 2008 Jamestown dollar, and there never will be.

That one-year-only rule is what gives a modern commemorative its character. The Mint doesn't strike them to meet demand year after year — it makes a fixed batch for the occasion and stops. When it's gone, it's gone.

The obverse — the heads side — does something quietly ambitious. Instead of one founder's portrait, it shows three figures standing together: an English settler (Captain John Smith), a Powhatan man, and an African woman. The Mint's own description called them the three peoples whose lives collided at Jamestown — the colonists, the Native nations already living there, and the first Africans brought to the colony in 1619. A wooden stockade and a building sit behind them, standing in for the fort itself. The design is by Donna Weaver and was sculpted by Don Everhart, two of the Mint's most prolific medallic artists of the era.

The reverse — the tails side — is the image most people picture when they think of Jamestown: the three ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, that carried the colonists across the Atlantic. It was designed by Susan Gamble through the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — a project that brought outside artists into coin design — and sculpted by Charles L. Vickers.

The coin is struck in the classic American silver-dollar formula: 90% silver, 10% copper, 26.73 grams, 38.1 millimeters across, with a reeded (grooved) edge. Every example carries the P mint mark of the Philadelphia Mint, where the whole issue was struck.

This is an accessible coin, and that's part of its appeal. The Mint sold it in two finishes: an Uncirculated version (a normal, satin-to-brilliant strike) and a Proof — a coin made on specially polished dies and planchets, struck with extra pressure to give mirror fields and frosted, sculpted detail. The proof outsold the uncirculated by a wide margin: 258,802 proofs against 79,801 uncirculated coins. By the usual logic, the rarer uncirculated version is the one fewer people set aside.

Two numbers frame the whole issue. Congress authorized up to 500,000 silver dollars; collectors bought 338,603. The unsold balance was never struck, which is normal for a modern commemorative — the authorized figure is a ceiling, not a promise. There are no mint-mark varieties to chase and no famous die errors that define the date; every coin came from Philadelphia.

Where it gets interesting for collectors is at the top of the grading scale. Coins are graded on a 70-point scale, and at the very peak — MS-70 for uncirculated, PF-70 for proof — the coin has to be flawless under magnification. Plenty of Jamestown dollars grade just short of perfect; the genuinely pristine ones, slabbed in a 70 holder by a major grading service, are the ones that command a premium over the base silver-and-collector value. The coin's metal value also gives it a floor: it contains close to three-quarters of an ounce of pure silver, so it never trades far below what that silver is worth.

There's one more thing worth knowing, because it's the part most newcomers don't realize. Built into the price was a $10 surcharge on every coin — money that went, by law, to the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, the Secretary of the Interior, and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. Buying the coin in 2007 was, in a small way, funding the preservation of the place it honors. That's the bargain at the heart of every U.S. commemorative: you pay above face value, and the difference does something.