Philip Fowler

Philip E. Fowler spent twenty-four years making things almost no one would ever connect to his name. He was a sculptor-engraver at the United States Mint — the artist who turns a coin or medal design into the hardened steel die, the stamp that presses the image into metal. Most of what he cut wore someone else's portrait, or carried no signature at all.

He was born in New York City on March 2, 1926. He served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, in the last years of the Second World War, then trained as an artist at two of the country's oldest art schools — the Corcoran School in Washington and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. On April 9, 1962, the Mint appointed him an assistant engraver at Philadelphia, part of a small in-house engraving staff that did the patient, hidden work behind the nation's coins and medals. He stayed nearly a quarter-century, retiring on March 3, 1986.

Fowler was a member of the National Sculpture Society, the body of American sculptors founded in 1893. He died in San Diego, California, on June 13, 2000.

A Mint engraver's job is anonymous by design, and Fowler's working life shows what that really means. Far more of his output was medals than coins — the long, official roll of Treasury and Mint medals that mark anniversaries, dedications, and departing officials. He cut the reverse — the back, or "tails," side — of the bronze medals honoring Treasury figures like Secretary David M. Kennedy and Mint Director Mary Brooks. He did the reverses of U.S. Assay Commission medals across the 1960s and '70s, the John Jay "first Chief Justice" medal, the 1969 Golden Spike centennial medal, and dedication medals for new Mint and Treasury buildings. This steady, unsigned work filled most of his career.

One thread runs straight through it. In 1977 Fowler again worked with engraver Edward R. Grove on an Assay Commission medal that put Martha Washington on the obverse — the same First Lady the two men had paired twelve years earlier on the Mint's most secret coin. It was a quiet reunion of the design that would outlast everything else either man made.

His most public coin work came in gold. The Mint's American Arts Commemorative Series of 1980–1984 was a homegrown answer to South Africa's Krugerrand — large gold medallions honoring American writers and artists, sold to keep U.S. gold buyers buying American. For the 1983 one-ounce piece, Fowler designed the portrait of poet Robert Frost. Its reverse carried lines from "The Road Not Taken" — two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by — which makes Fowler's Frost one of the very few pieces of U.S. gold to quote a poem.

But the work that outlasted him is the one almost no collector can legally own.

Mount Vernon, the coin that hides <!-- kind: prose; anchor: mount-vernon -->

In 1965 the Mint had a problem made of metal. It was pulling silver out of the dime and quarter and replacing it with a copper-nickel "clad" sandwich, and the engineers needed to see how the new alloys behaved — how they flowed, how cleanly they filled a die, how they wore — before betting the nation's coinage on them. But a trial coin stamped with a real design was dangerous: it could leak a future design, or slip out a back door and pass as money.

The Mint's answer was a pair of fantasy dies — images that look like a coin but aren't legal tender, carry no denomination, and copy no real motif. As the numismatist Q. David Bowers put it, fantasy designs were used "to avoid creating rarities by using regular dies." Edward R. Grove modeled the obverse: a portrait of Martha Washington, dated 1759, the year she married George. Fowler cut the reverse — Mount Vernon, the Washington family home on the Potomac — and tucked his initials below the right side of the house. It was never meant to be beautiful. It was a blank check for metallurgy: a face the Mint could strike in any experimental alloy without giving anything away.

That is exactly why it never went away. When the cent switched from bronze to copper-plated zinc in 1982, the Mint reached for Martha and Mount Vernon again. It used them once more around 1999 while working out the alloy for the new Sacagawea dollar. And around 2011–2013, when Congress asked whether the cent and nickel could be made of something cheaper, the Mint cut fresh Martha Washington dies and struck a new run of test pieces in trial metals at Philadelphia. Most experimental strikes are destroyed; a handful escape, and collectors prize them precisely because they're the coins the Mint never meant anyone to keep — a recovered set has changed hands for tens of thousands of dollars. Sixty years on, when the United States quietly experiments with what its money is made of, it is still pressing Philip Fowler's drawing of George Washington's house into the metal.