The Stone Mountain Memorial Half Dollar

In 1923, a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum climbed the face of Stone Mountain, a vast dome of granite outside Atlanta, and began carving the head of Robert E. Lee into the rock. The plan was enormous: a Confederate memorial cut directly into the mountainside. The plan was also broke.

Carving a mountain is expensive, and the Stone Mountain Confederate Monumental Association — the private group behind the project — ran short of money fast. Their solution was unusual and clever. They asked Congress to authorize a commemorative coin they could sell to the public at a markup, with the proceeds funding the carving. On March 17, 1924, President Coolidge signed the bill. It authorized up to 5,000,000 half dollars.

The coin was meant to do two jobs at once: honor "the soldier of the South," and quietly funnel the difference between its 50-cent face value and its $1.00 sale price into the carving fund. This was the standard machinery of early U.S. commemoratives — Congress let a private group buy the coins at face value, and the group sold them at a premium to anyone who'd pay. The Mint produced the coins; the cause kept the spread.

It was also, by 1925, a deeply political object. The bill's original language tied the coin partly to the memory of the recently deceased President Warren Harding, but Coolidge had that reference struck. And the subject itself — a monument to the Confederacy, carved in the decade the second Ku Klux Klan was reborn near that very mountain — meant the coin was contested from the start. The story below is the documented history of the coin and its campaign; the meaning of the monument it funded remains argued over to this day.

The obverse — the heads side — shows two Confederate generals on horseback: Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, riding together beneath the motto IN GOD WE TRUST. The reverse — the tails side — carries an eagle perched on a crag, with the words MEMORIAL TO THE VALOR OF THE SOLDIER OF THE SOUTH wrapping the rim. Both sides were the work of Gutzon Borglum.

That name is the twist. Borglum is far better known today for what he carved next — the four presidents at Mount Rushmore. Stone Mountain was where his monumental-carving career began, and where it nearly ended in scandal.

The first coins were struck on January 21, 1925 — chosen as the 101st anniversary of Stonewall Jackson's birth. Borglum stood at the medal press as the first 1,000 came off. Then, in February 1925, the Association fired him. The reasons were a tangle of cost overruns, technical disputes, and accusations of mismanagement; the Association's president sneered that Borglum had taken seven months to design the coin when "any competent artist" could have done it in three weeks. Borglum's response was to destroy his working models for the monument and leave Georgia. Reports of his exact movements vary, but he soon turned his attention west — to the Black Hills of South Dakota and the project that made him famous.

His replacement, sculptor Augustus Lukeman, eventually had Borglum's work blasted off the mountain to start over. The carving you can visit today — Lee, Jackson, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis, the largest relief sculpture in the world — wasn't dedicated until 1970, nearly half a century after the coin meant to pay for it first appeared.

Here is the paradox that makes the Stone Mountain so collectible: it is one of the most common classic commemoratives, yet its story is one of the most dramatic. With more than 1.3 million distributed, this is not a rarity. You can hold one without spending a fortune, and that accessibility is exactly why it's a favorite first commemorative for new collectors.

The interest, then, is in condition and in the campaign's strange leftovers. Like all classic commemoratives, value climbs steeply with grade — a coin that survived a century with full original luster and no contact marks is worth far more than a circulated example, because most of these were handled, carried, and saved loosely rather than protected. (A "grade," on a slabbed coin, is the number a grading service assigns on a standard scale; higher means better preserved.)

The campaign's quirks are where it gets fun. To squeeze more money out of each coin, the Association counterstamped some — punching extra letters and numbers onto the surface — and auctioned them at a premium. There were pieces stamped with state abbreviations, "U.D.C." coins for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and numbered coins tied to fundraising competitions. By one account, South Carolina counterstamped pieces sold for an average of $23 apiece, and a single coin from Bradenton, Florida reportedly fetched $1,300 — an astonishing sum for a 50-cent piece in the 1920s. Genuine counterstamped examples are a collecting niche in their own right; because they were profitable, they were also widely faked, so attribution matters.

The campaign itself was a financial disappointment. A 1928 audit found that of every dollar the coins raised, only about 27 cents actually reached the carving — the rest went to expenses. By 1930, banks were sitting on so many unsold coins that roughly a million were shipped back to the Mint and melted. That melt is why a coin made by the millions still has a finite, fixed population today.