Adam Eckfeldt
John Adam Eckfeldt was a worker and official in the early days of the United States Mint. He built early presses for the Mint, engraved some of its early dies, and was responsible for the designs of early American copper coinage. He is believed to have made the die from which the 1792 half disme, considered by some the first official U.S. coin, was struck.
About Adam Eckfeldt in brief
John Adam Eckfeldt was a worker and official in the early days of the United States Mint. He built early presses for the Mint, engraved some of its early dies, and was responsible for the designs of early American copper coinage. He is believed to have made the die from which the 1792 half disme, considered by some the first official U.S. coin, was struck. He was born in Philadelphia on June 15, 1769, the son of a large-scale manufacturer of edge-tools and implements. His father made dies for the 1783 coinage under the Articles of Confederation authorized by Philadelphia financier Robert Morris. He also built the first screw press for the new facility in 1792, the same year that the Mint Act of 1792 was passed by Congress authorizing a mint. His death in 1852 caused his replacement, Franklin Peale, to seek an assistant. He served a quarter century as chief coiner, during which time the Philadelphia Mint moved to new premises. As he set aside unusual coins brought in as bullion, he started the Mint’s coin cabinet, which evolved into the National Numismatic Collection.
In 1793 he built a device for automatically feeding planchets into the die and ejecting the coins struck. By October 1795 he was on the mint’s payroll, as a die and turner for turner, at a salary of USD 500 per year. On January 1, 1796, President George Washington appointed him assistant coiner with the consent of President Elias Boudin. He died in 1839, and is buried in Philadelphia’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, along with his wife, Maria Magdalena, who he married in 1764. The couple had immigrated from Nuremberg, Bavaria, around 1764, and had two children, John and Maria, who were born in 1770 and 1780. They died in 1791 and 1894, and John was buried in Mount Auburn, Pennsylvania, near the site of the present-day Philadelphia International Airport, where he used to work as a machinist. The Eckfeldts had a son, John, who was also a worker at the Mint and served as a coiner from 1814 until 1839. He had a daughter, Mary, who died in 1903, and a son-in-law, William, who worked at the mint from 1839 until 1852.
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This page is based on the article Adam Eckfeldt published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
