1797 50C MS(PCGS#6060)

February 2026 Showcase Auction - The James A. Stack, Sr. Collection Part II

Auctioneer

Stack's Bowers

Lot Number

25073

Grade

F15

Price

90,000

Lot Description

Amato 430. Tompkins Die Stage 4/4. The Dean Oakes Family Collection is pleased to present a rare second offering for the challenging Draped Bust, Small Eagle half dollar design type. Both sides of this moderately circulated 1797 Overton-101a are pleasingly toned in a warm, medium silver gray with a slightly darker shade near the borders. Liberty's portrait on the obverse and the eagle on the reverse were both well struck and stand out nicely against the fields. Peripheral detail is likewise impressive for the assigned grade, a tad softer at upper right obverse and lower right reverse than elsewhere, but pleasingly bold overall. The surfaces are essentially unblemished and there are no significant nicks or scratches on either side. Impressively smooth, in fact, tiny marks in the reverse field above the top of the eagle's left wing and to the right of the fraction bar in the denomination are mentioned solely for identification purposes, and helped us confirm the provenance of this piece.<p>The 1797 half dollar is a profoundly enigmatic issue whose intrigue is only overshadowed by its scarcity. Echoing the symbolism portrayed by the flag of the United States, the earliest coins of the United States Mint depicted a star count that tried at best to mirror the number of states belonging to the Union at the time of striking. Fittingly so, the half dollars of 1794 and 1795 display 15 stars on the obverse - a number justified by Kentucky's admission on June 1st 1792. In anticipation of 1796's half dollar mintage, officials prepared a 1796-dated 15-star die for use, though no half dollars were struck in said year. However, by the time mintage resumed in the beginning of 1797, Tennessee had already joined the Union on June 1st of 1796 and a 16-stars motif was appropriate. Never to be wasteful, the Mint employed this wrongly dated and wrongly starred obverse, eventually transitioning to a 1796-dated 16-star obverse by some other combination of misguidance. Then, most curiously, a third die was created to finish out the 1797 half dollar production year; properly dated 1797, though ornamented with just 15 stars on the obverse. Several theories and conjectures have emerged to explain how this blundered regression might have occurred, though whether terribly complex or astoundingly simple, the error in star count for the 1797 Draped Bust half dollar has left numismatic scholars scratching their heads for the past two centuries.