The Pilgrim Half Dollar: a 300-year anniversary, struck two years running

In 1620, a leaky merchant ship called the Mayflower dropped about a hundred English settlers on the coast of what is now Massachusetts. Three centuries later, Plymouth wanted to throw a party — and pay for it.

So Massachusetts congressman Joseph Walsh introduced a bill, and on May 12, 1920, President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law. It authorized up to 300,000 silver half dollars to mark the Pilgrim Tercentenary — tercentenary simply meaning the 300th anniversary. The coins weren't a gift from the government. The Mint struck them at face value, handed them to the organizers, and the organizers sold them to the public for a dollar apiece. The profit funded the celebration. This was the standard playbook for early U.S. commemoratives: a coin doubling as a fundraiser.

The first year went well. Then came the second year — and the second year is where this coin earns its reputation.

The obverse — the heads side — shows Governor William Bradford in a tall Pilgrim hat, a book tucked under his arm, lost in thought. Bradford led the Plymouth Colony and wrote its history, Of Plymouth Plantation, which is the book he's carrying. There's a catch worth knowing: no real portrait of Bradford survives, so the face on the coin is invented. It's a Pilgrim, not the Pilgrim.

The reverse — the tails side — gives you the Mayflower in full sail, riding the Atlantic. It reads "PILGRIM TERCENTENARY CELEBRATION" with "1620 – 1920" below. Look closely and you'll spot a small historical slip: the ship flies a triangular jib sail off its bow, a rig that didn't exist on ships of 1620. A charming anachronism that numismatists have pointed out for a century.

The artist was Cyrus E. Dallin, a Boston sculptor far better known for his monumental Native American figures — his Appeal to the Great Spirit still sits outside Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. He worked from sketches supplied by the Tercentenary Commission and turned them into the plaster models the Mint used. Not everyone admired the result: sculptor James Earle Fraser, the man behind the Buffalo nickel, criticized the coin's crude lettering. The Treasury approved it anyway.

There are only two coins in this series, and the gap between them is the whole game.

The 1920 issue is common. Over 150,000 reached collectors and the public, so a presentable example has never been hard to find. The 1921 is the prize — and the reason is a melting pot.

When the organizers came back for a second year, they added a tiny "1921" to the obverse, just left of Bradford's face, so the date sat on the coin for the first time. The plain commercial logic was that anyone building a set would now need two coins instead of one. But 1921 brought a sharp recession, the novelty had worn off, and demand collapsed. Of the 100,053 struck, 80,000 came back unsold. The Mint melted them. Only about 20,053 survived — making the 1921 roughly seven times scarcer than the 1920, and worth a large multiple of it in every grade.

The numismatist Q. David Bowers singled out this second-year reissue as an early example of a coin made less to commemorate than to "get" the collector — to lean on the urge to complete a set. Decades of multi-year commemorative programs would follow that template. As with most early commemoratives, the prices climb fastest at the top: mint-state coins with full, frosty original luster and clean fields command real premiums, because so many were spent, cleaned, or knocked around in the century since.