Cincinnati Musical Center half dollar
The Cincinnati Musical Center half dollar is a 50-cent piece struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1936. It was conceived by Thomas G. Melish, a coin enthusiast who controlled the group which was allowed to buy the entire issue from the government. The piece was struck in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Cincinnati, Ohio, as a center of music, and its contribution of the annual May festival to the art of music.
About Cincinnati Musical Center half dollar in brief
The Cincinnati Musical Center half dollar is a 50-cent piece struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1936. It was conceived by Thomas G. Melish, a coin enthusiast who controlled the group which was allowed to buy the entire issue from the government. Congress approved legislation for the coin on March 31, 1936, authorizing 15,000 pieces to be struck at the three mints then in operation. With few pieces available, prices for the set spiked, rising to over five times the issue price. The value dropped somewhat when the boom in commemorative coins burst in late 1936, but quickly recovered and the coins are valuable today. The piece was struck in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Cincinnati, Ohio, as a center of music, and its contribution of the annual May festival to the art of music for the past 50 years. The Commission of Fine Arts refused to recommend the designs. Members objected to the depiction of Stephen Foster on the obverse, finding no connection between Foster, who died in 1864, and the supposed anniversary. Nevertheless, the designs were approved by the Mint, and 5,000 sets were issued and sold to Melish’s group, the only authorized purchaser. The pieces were to honor the 50th anniversary of the Cincinnati Music Center, as well as the contribution of Cincinnati to the music industry. The coins were later issued by President Franklin Roosevelt, and were signed by him on March 30, 1936. They are still in circulation today, and are considered a valuable piece of U.S.
coin history. The coin was struck by Constance Ortmayer, a sculptor who was later remembered by someone through Cincinnati for her work on the coin, so they were later used for a public art exhibit in the city in the 1970s and 1980s. It is one of the few examples of a commemorative coin to have been struck by a single mint, and is the only one of its kind in the world. It has been described as “one of the most valuable coins in the history of the coin collecting hobby” by numismatic writer Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen, in their volume on their book “The Coin Collectors’ Guide to the Coin Collecting World” The coin is currently owned by a private collector and is on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Coin History in New York, New York and Los Angeles, California, among other places. It can be ordered by clicking here for a copy of the bill that authorized the coin’s production and to see more information on the Museum’s history of commemoratives. The bill would have provided for 10,000 coins from the Philadelphia Mint, 2,000 coin from Denver, and 3,000 from the San Francisco Mint. Such a low mintage would have made the Denver coin a significant rarity, increasing Melish’s profit. Until 1954, the entire mintage of such issues was sold by the government at face value to a group authorized by Congress.
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This page is based on the article Cincinnati Musical Center half dollar published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
