St Gaudens Double Eagle – The Most Beautiful Coin Ever Minted?
The lure of gold has captured the imagination for centuries and for the coin enthusiast, your stash of gold is probably the pinnacle of your coin collection. And even beyond that, the most sought after gold coin is the $20 Gold Double Eagle designed by Augustus St Gaudens and minted between 1907 and 1933.
Many people consider St Gaudens $20 gold coins to be the most beautiful coins ever minted in the United States and some consider them to be the most beautiful coin ever minted, period. President Theodore Roosevelt admired ancient Greek coinage and wanted to bring the beauty he saw in those coins to US coinage. He contacted artist and sculptor Agustus St Gaudens to redesign the $10 and $20 gold coins and the design St Gaudens came up with for the $20 gold piece was that of Lady Liberty on the obverse and a flying bald eagle on the reverse. The classic St Gaudens Double Eagle was born.
The first of these coins had an extremely high relief and the Chief Engraver of the US Mint detested the coins because the high relief design required a long minting process that turned out to be very expensive. Thus only 11,250 of these special coins were ever struck making them extremely valuable. Starting bids for these coins are in the range of $20,000 to $30,000 on eBay and go up from there.
This past August of 2007 it was reported that an ultra-high relief lettered edge version of this 1907 coin traded hands above $3 million. This was a nearly flawless coin graded at Proof 69 by both NCG and PCGS and is the second highest price ever paid for a coin worldwide. So what was the highest price ever paid for a coin? You guessed it, another St Gaudens $20 gold piece. This time it was the extremely rare 1933 coin of which there are only 11 known in the world and only 1 legally available for sale. This coin brought an amazing $7.5 million back in July of 2002.
In August of 2005 10 of these coins surfaced when Joan Langboard found them in her father's jewelry store safe after he died. Her father, Israel Switt, was a suspect in an original theft of some of these coins in 1933, but they were never recovered until Mrs. Langboard turned them over to the US Mint. A lawsuit is now pending by Mrs Langboard to recover the coins after money she was promised never materialized.
Any other instance of this coin is deemed illegal to own as President Roosevelt ordered the US mint to stop making these coins and declared it illegal to own gold. Any minted 1933 gold double eagles were to be melted down thus making this the most valuable coin in existence. Some were stolen from the mint in 1933 and many were recovered, but any in existence today would be declared illegal to own by an individual or collector. However, if any of these coins were to surface today I'm sure they would not be destroyed due to their extreme value. But the collector or individual would certainly have a lot of explaining to do as in the case of Mrs Langboard.
Aside from these extremely rare versions of the St Gaudens Double Eagle, anyone who is interested in coin collecting can obtain one of these beauties starting for about $750 on eBay or from a private collector. And then you too can say you own what is considered by some as the most beautiful coin in the world.
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