The Half Dollar That Put a Wildcat on American Money

In August 1777, the Revolution was going badly. A British army under General Burgoyne was driving down from Canada toward the Hudson, splitting the colonies in two. To feed his troops he sent a raiding force toward a supply depot at Bennington, in the disputed territory that would become Vermont.

He never reached it. American militia — including the Green Mountain Boys, the rough frontier fighters who had made the region ungovernable for years — met the raiders and crushed them. The Battle of Bennington bled Burgoyne of men he could not replace. Weeks later he surrendered at Saratoga, the turning point that brought France into the war.

Vermont remembered. The same year, 1777, it declared itself an independent republic — a small nation that would not join the United States for fourteen more years. So when the 150th anniversary came around, the state had two milestones to honor at once: a battle that helped win a war, and the moment it declared itself free. Congress agreed. On February 24, 1925, President Calvin Coolidge — himself a Vermonter by birth — signed the act authorizing a commemorative half dollar.

A commemorative half dollar is a legal-tender 50-cent coin struck to mark an event, usually sold above face value to raise money for a cause. The obverse — the heads side — and the reverse both carry custom art instead of the standard circulating design. Getting that art approved was its own battle.

The first sculptor hired, Sherry Fry, proposed putting the tall Bennington Battle Monument on the reverse — the tails side. The Commission of Fine Arts, the federal body that vetted coin designs, rejected it. Its chairman pushed for something far stranger: a catamount, the old New England word for a mountain lion. The animal nodded to the Catamount Tavern in Bennington, the inn where the Green Mountain Boys had plotted their rebellion under a stuffed wildcat snarling toward New York. Fry walked away from the project. The Mint brought in Charles Keck instead.

Keck delivered both sides. The obverse carries an idealized portrait of Ira Allen — younger brother of Ethan Allen, a founder of the state and of the University of Vermont — in a periwig, ringed by the words "FOUNDER OF VERMONT." The reverse is the catamount itself, prowling left, lean and alert, above "BATTLE OF BENNINGTON" and the twin dates 1777–1927. It is one of the rare U.S. coins to put a living predator front and center — no eagle, no allegory, just a cat that looks like it might leap off the metal.

There is only one Vermont half dollar to chase — one year, one mint, one design. That makes it a single-coin "type," and it sits on most collectors' checklists of the classic early commemoratives (the run of silver issues struck from 1892 to 1954). So the game is not about hunting a rare date. It is about condition.

The Mint struck 40,034 coins in early 1927, but the public never warmed to them. Almost a third went unsold and were shipped back for melting — 11,892 of them by 1934 — leaving roughly 28,142 in collectors' hands. That sounds scarce, and in top grades it is. Many surviving coins show contact marks or weak strike on the high points of the design. A strike is how fully the press pushed metal into the die — the engraved steel stamp — and Keck's bold, high-relief portrait of Allen is unforgiving: the highest points wear and bag-mark first. Sharp, clean, original examples in the upper Mint State grades command a real premium over typical survivors.

One word of caution that the coin's popularity earned it: the Vermont half dollar has been counterfeited. As with any commemorative worth real money, a coin certified by a major grading service — sealed in a holder, or "slab" — carries far more confidence than a raw, unverified piece.