John Baer Stoudt

John Baer Stoudt never claimed to be an artist. He was a country preacher with a scholar's obsession — and that obsession is the reason his name sits in coin catalogs today.

He was born in 1878 in Maxatawny Township, in the Pennsylvania-German farm country of Berks County, and he grew up on a farm in nearby Richmond Township. He worked his way up through Keystone State Normal School (now Kutztown University), Franklin and Marshall College, and the Reformed Church's seminary at Lancaster, graduating with honors in 1908. That same year he was ordained, and for the rest of his life he served Reformed congregations in the Lehigh Valley — first the Salisbury charge near Emaus, then Grace Reformed Church in Northampton.

But the pulpit was only half of him. For roughly fifteen years Stoudt walked the back roads of Pennsylvania-German country, writing down the rhymes, ballads, and old beliefs of his neighbors in their own dialect before they could disappear. The result, The Folklore of the Pennsylvania Germans (1916), was one of the first serious collections of that vanishing oral world — and it is still in print. He wrote constantly: parish histories, a study of the Liberty Bell, a genealogy of his own family, and books on the Huguenots, the French Protestants he was descended from. He died in Allentown in 1944.

The thread that pulled Stoudt onto a coin was that Huguenot ancestry. He had become a recognized authority on Huguenot history, so in 1922 he was made director of the Huguenot-Walloon Tercentenary — the national celebration of the 300th anniversary of the first Walloon and Huguenot settlers reaching the New York area aboard the ship Nieuw Nederlandt in 1624.

When the celebration won approval for a commemorative half dollar, Stoudt didn't hire a sculptor and step back. He supplied the idea and the sketches himself, and he went before Congress to explain them. He put two Protestant heroes on the obverse — the heads side — as jugate busts, meaning two overlapping profiles facing the same way: Gaspard de Coligny of France and William the Silent of the Netherlands. The reverse — the tails side — carries the ship that brought the settlers across. His drawings also shaped the matching commemorative postage stamp.

A historian's pencil sketch, though, can't simply be struck into silver. That job fell to George T. Morgan, the Mint's chief engraver — by then in his late seventies, and famous as the man behind the 1878 Morgan dollar. Morgan turned Stoudt's drawings into the plaster models the dies are cut from. So the coin carries two hands: the historian who imagined it, and the master engraver who tried to make it real.

It did not go smoothly. Morgan's first models were rejected by the Commission of Fine Arts, the federal body that signs off on coin and monument designs. The verdict was that the workmanship simply wasn't good enough.

Rather than scrap it, the commission handed the fix to James Earle Fraser — the sculptor who had designed the Buffalo nickel — and let the elderly Morgan revise his models under Fraser's eye. It was an awkward moment: as numismatists Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen later noted, Fraser's own work was on the nickel in everyone's pocket, while neither Morgan's nor the Mint's other veteran engraver had a design on any coin then in production. In January 1924 Fraser reported that the reworked models were "considerably improved," and the commission approved them.

The subject matter drew fire too. Critics pointed out the obvious: Coligny died in 1572 and William the Silent in 1584 — roughly forty to fifty years before the 1624 voyage the coin was supposed to honor. The Jesuit journal America went further, complaining that a federal coin was being used to stage a Protestant celebration. The objections didn't stop it. 142,080 half dollars were struck at Philadelphia in early 1924 — fewer than half the 300,000 Congress had authorized. Sales were soft enough that about 55,000 unsold coins went back to the Mint and were quietly spent into ordinary circulation.