Walter H. Rich

Most people whose names appear on American coins were sculptors or trained engravers. Walter H. Rich was a man who knew birds.

Walter Herbert Rich was born in 1866 and built his life around the wildlife of the Northeast. He was largely self-taught — he drew as a child and never stopped — and his subjects were always alive: the gamebirds of New England, the salmon and groundfish of cold northern water. He worked in watercolor and gouache, and he saw the way a field naturalist sees, by patient close looking rather than by an art-school formula.

He earned his living from that knowledge. From 1913 until his retirement in 1936 he was an agent for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in Portland, Maine, and he served as curator of the museum of the Portland Society of Natural History. He also wrote and illustrated his own books. Feathered Game of the Northeast (1907) ran to 432 pages with more than 80 of his own bird illustrations; the government report Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine (1929) carried his careful diagrams of the banks where the fishing fleets worked. He drew the salmon plates for W. C. Kendall's Fishes of New England, and between roughly 1910 and 1920 he made pelagic bird studies off Cape Cod alongside the naturalist H. K. Job.

A reviewer in The Nation in 1907 caught what made him unusual: he was "not only the student and collector of the material for which he writes, but the artist as well." That is the whole man in one line. Rich studied a thing, then drew it. The coin was the one time that habit met the United States Mint.

In 1936, the committee planning the 300th anniversary of York County, Maine, needed a commemorative half dollar — and they turned to a local artist they trusted. Walter H. Rich was the obvious choice in Portland: a known painter, a naturalist, a man with a name. He was also a stranger to coin design, a craft where a picture has to survive being shrunk to coin size, pressed into hard metal, and read at arm's length in shallow relief.

He worked from what was at hand. For the obverse — the "heads" side — he drew Brown's Garrison, the fortified house the county had grown up around, basing it on a sketch from Frank C. Deering's 1931 book The Proprietors of Saco. He gave it the Saco River, four sentries (one on horseback), and a rising sun spreading rays behind the word LIBERTY. For the reverse he used York County's official seal: a cross and a pine tree for Maine, ringed by the legend "YORK COUNTY — FIRST COUNTY IN MAINE." The federal Commission of Fine Arts, which vets U.S. coin designs, met with Rich and approved his work in July 1936 on one condition — slight changes to the lettering.

Then came a genuinely unusual step. Rich's designs were sculpted not in the usual plaster but in brass, by the G. S. Pacetti Company of Boston. The numismatist Walter P. Nichols called it the first time brass models had been made for a U.S. coin and said it "provoked much favorable comment." The Medallic Art Company of New York then reduced those models into the working dies that struck the coin. (A die is the engraved steel stamp that presses the image into the blank; relief is how far the design rises off the flat field around it.)

The result split opinion, and still does. The harsh camp was loud. Don Taxay panned the "amateurish rendering of Brown's Garrison" and its "tedious background." The dealer B. Max Mehl shrugged in 1937 that the design "reminds me more of a medal than coin and in my humble opinion would hardly win a beauty prize." The art historian Cornelius Vermeule was cruelest, writing that "few [coins] have deserved ashes and odium more than this" and likening it to "a medallion for a bottle of vintage brandy." But others stood up for it: Stuart Mosher in 1940 called the obverse "splendid," and in 1975 William F. Sheehan argued that the broad, flat rims deliberately echoed colonial Massachusetts coinage like the pine tree shilling — "a harmonious union of motifs from English colonial coinage." That argument tells you something true either way: the flatness critics saw is exactly what you'd expect from an illustrator thinking in ink and paper, not a sculptor thinking in metal — and from a man getting a single coin's worth of practice at it.