Trygve A. Rovelstad

Trygve A. Rovelstad spent nearly his whole life within a few blocks of one Illinois river — chasing one idea.

He was born in Elgin, Illinois, on September 27, 1903, to Norwegian immigrant parents. The gift showed early. He studied first at the art studio on George Fabyan's estate in nearby Geneva, then talked his way into the studio of Lorado Taft — one of the most celebrated American sculptors of the day — while taking classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. From there he went east to the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York. It was serious training for a small-town kid. He brought it home rather than away.

By the 1930s Rovelstad had fixed on the project that would shadow the rest of his life: a heroic bronze memorial to the pioneer families who settled the Fox River valley. Almost everything else he made — the busts, the medals, the coin — became, in one way or another, a means of getting that monument built.

Rovelstad worked in relief — the art of raising a figure out of a flat surface so it reads as sculpture you could almost run a finger over. It is the exact discipline a coin or a medal demands, and it became his trade: figures that had to stay legible when shrunk to the width of a thumbnail.

His widest reach came not from a gallery but from the U.S. Army. Rovelstad was the first medalist sculptor of the U.S. War Department, and during World War II he designed decorations that millions would wear. The most famous is the Combat Infantryman Badge — the silver rifle on a blue bar that marks a soldier who has fought on the front line — which he designed in 1943, the year the Army established it. He is also credited with the Bronze Star Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Occupation of Germany Medal, and the Women's Army Corps insignia. Few Americans know his name. A great many have saluted his work.

Then there was the coin. Rovelstad designed both faces of the 1936 Elgin, Illinois, Centennial half dollar. The obverse — the heads side — is an idealized pioneer in profile. The reverse — the tails side — is a pioneer family: four adults and a baby in its mother's arms, pressing west. That reverse was no abstraction. It was a study, in miniature, for the very statue he was trying to fund. He was putting his unbuilt monument into thousands of pockets.

Here is the part that makes Rovelstad worth a stranger's attention.

The Great Depression had killed any hope of public money for his memorial. So Rovelstad turned to the coinage itself. With Elgin's centennial approaching, Representative Chauncey Reed carried a bill through Congress, and on June 16, 1936, President Roosevelt signed it. The plan was simple: sell a commemorative half dollar above face value and put the profit toward the bronze. The Commission of Fine Arts approved the designs — after asking Rovelstad to turn the pioneer's head into profile. The Medallic Art Company of New York reduced his models to working dies, and the Philadelphia Mint struck the coins.

The catch was simple, and human. Of about 25,000 struck, distribution was handed to a Texas coin dealer, L.W. Hoffecker of El Paso, who offered them at $1.50 apiece. People balked at paying that for a fifty-cent piece. Only about 20,000 sold; the remaining 5,000 went back to the Mint to be melted, leaving a net of roughly 20,015 coins. The fund came up short. The statue stalled.

Rovelstad never let it go. In 1957 he founded the Pioneer Memorial Foundation of Illinois to keep raising money, and he stayed "unfailingly optimistic," friends said, that it would one day stand. He died in 1990 without seeing it. His Pioneer Family Memorial was finally cast and dedicated at Elgin's Kimball Street Bridge, on the bank of the Fox River, on November 11, 2001 — Veterans Day, sixty-five years after the coin meant to pay for it. Today his half dollar sits in collections as one of the more affordable "classic" U.S. commemoratives, quietly carrying the picture of the monument it was supposed to buy.