1908 Indian Head quarter eagle

The coin

This piece is a 1908 quarter eagle, the first year of the Indian Head type. The obverse carries a male bust in a feathered headdress, facing left, LIBERTY on the arc and the date 1908 below, with stars around the rim. The reverse shows an eagle standing left on a bundle of arrows and an olive branch; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on the arc, IN GOD WE TRUST to the left of the eagle, E PLURIBUS UNUM to the right, and 2½ DOLLARS below. The devices are sunk into the field: Bela Lyon Pratt’s incuse design, the same one used on the five-dollar half eagle. The denomination read on the piece is 2½ DOLLARS. Pratt’s half eagle reads FIVE DOLLARS and measures 21.6 mm. Saint-Gaudens’ ten-dollar eagle has LIBERTY on the headband and TEN DOLLARS. To the left of the arrow bundle, where the type places the mint mark, no D is read. The edge is not photographed. No serial and no holder.

Legends

Obverse

LIBERTY · 1908. Stars around the rim. The initials BLP (Bela Lyon Pratt) belong to the published type.

Reverse

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA · IN GOD WE TRUST (left) · E PLURIBUS UNUM (right) · 2½ DOLLARS. No D to the left of the arrows.

History

The Coinage Act of 1792 set the eagle at ten dollars; the quarter eagle is the two-and-a-half-dollar piece. In 1908, at the urging of Theodore Roosevelt and William Sturgis Bigelow, the Mint adopted Bela Lyon Pratt’s incuse model for the quarter eagle and the half eagle: the devices sit below the field, so the coin would stack and the relief would not wear as on Saint-Gaudens’ high relief. Charles E. Barber, chief engraver, retouched the dies; Pratt wrote that the retouching spoiled his model. The 1908 quarter eagle was struck for circulation at Philadelphia only. Denver’s D on this type begins in 1911. The pieces entered circulation in early November 1908. In 1933 Executive Order 6102 ended the issue of gold coin and, with it, the series opened in 1796. This record describes the photographed specimen. No provenance is recorded here.

Scarcity and type

1908 is the first year of the type (1908–1915 and 1925–1929) and a common date of the series, according to the PCGS CoinFacts summary. PCGS gives 564,821 Philadelphia circulation strikes (PCGS# 7939); Stack’s Bowers gives 565,057. This record does not choose between those two figures. Sandblast proofs are a separate issue: PCGS# 7957 and Stack’s Bowers publish 236. This photograph is not identified as that proof. No census and no price are republished.

Certification

The example is raw, with no NGC, PCGS, or other holder. The quarter eagle carries no serial number. The identity of this record is the photographed object — date 1908, 2½ DOLLARS, no D — not a certificate. If it is later slabbed, the cert number will replace this note.

Related pieces

Another piece in the United States collection.

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