JANUARY 20
2004•Peace Medal Nickel Begins a New Journey
2000•Mint Announces Sacagawea Dollar Retail Circulation Partnership
The Peace Medal Nickel Begins a New Journey for the Jefferson Five-Cent Coin
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January 20 • American Coin History Calendar
For sixty-six years, Americans saw essentially the same Monticello reverse whenever they turned over a Jefferson nickel. Then, on January 20, 2004, the U.S. Mint began producing a new circulating reverse showing the handshake and crossed pipe and tomahawk adapted from Jefferson-era peace medals. The coin launched the Westward Journey Nickel Series, commemorating the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark expedition while beginning the first circulating redesign of the Jefferson nickel since its debut in 1938.
A Nickel Changes After 66 Years
The Jefferson nickel was one of the most visually stable coins in American circulation.
Felix Schlag's portrait of Thomas Jefferson had occupied the obverse since 1938. His view of Jefferson's Virginia home, Monticello, had occupied the reverse for the same period.
There had been important wartime changes in composition and mint-mark placement during World War II, and details of the artwork had been refined, but the basic Jefferson-and-Monticello pairing remained intact.
In 2004, that continuity was deliberately interrupted.
The U.S. Mint identifies January 20, 2004 as the first day of mintage for the new Peace Medal five-cent coin.
The Philadelphia Mint struck the first-day pieces.
The occasion was significant enough that the Mint later issued an Official First Day Coin Cover containing two January 20 Philadelphia strikes.
Those coins represented the opening chapter of the Westward Journey Nickel Series.
Why Redesign the Nickel?
The immediate reason was historical commemoration.
The United States was marking the bicentennials of the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition.
President Thomas Jefferson's 1803 acquisition of the Louisiana territory dramatically expanded the nation's land claims. Jefferson then commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead an expedition westward across the continent.
Their Corps of Discovery left the St. Louis area in 1804, traveled to the Pacific and returned in 1806.
The nickel series would tell parts of that story through circulating money.
The redesign became possible through the American 5-Cent Coin Design Continuity Act of 2003.
The law allowed the Secretary of the Treasury to change the nickel's designs during 2003 through 2005 in recognition of the Louisiana Purchase bicentennial and the Lewis and Clark expedition.
It also protected Jefferson's long-term place on the denomination and required Monticello to return to the reverse beginning in 2006.
The result was not a permanent abandonment of the traditional nickel. It was a temporary historical journey.
The Mint planned four changing reverse designs over two years.
Two appeared in 2004 and two more in 2005.
The sequence began with the Peace Medal design, followed by the Keelboat. In 2005 came the American Bison and Ocean in View! reverses.
Together, the four coins formed a miniature narrative of diplomacy, transportation, western wildlife and the expedition's arrival at the Pacific.
The reverse shows two hands clasped in friendship beneath crossed symbols: a pipe and a tomahawk.
Above them appears LOUISIANA PURCHASE 1803.
The design is surrounded by the inscriptions UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, E PLURIBUS UNUM, FIVE CENTS and LEWIS & CLARK BICENTENNIAL.
The composition was adapted from the reverse of Indian peace medals associated with Thomas Jefferson's presidency.
European colonial powers had long used medals as diplomatic gifts in relationships with Native nations.
The young United States continued the practice.
Presidential peace medals generally carried the president's portrait on one side and symbolic imagery on the other. They could be presented to Native leaders during diplomatic meetings and treaty-related encounters.
The medals were physical expressions of political relationships—but those relationships were far more complicated than the word “peace” suggests.
Jefferson's Medal and the Handshake
Thomas Jefferson's peace medals used a reverse depicting clasped hands beneath a crossed pipe and tomahawk.
The hands symbolized friendship or agreement.
The pipe could represent peaceful diplomacy, while the tomahawk represented the possibility of conflict.
Together they expressed a choice between peace and war in a compact visual language.
The 2004 nickel borrowed that historical design rather than inventing a modern image of diplomacy.
Peace medals were among the diplomatic objects carried by the Corps of Discovery.
Lewis and Clark met many Native nations whose lands they crossed. They distributed medals, flags and other objects while explaining—through interpreters where possible—the transfer of Louisiana and the authority of the United States.
From the American government's perspective, the medals announced a new political relationship.
From Native perspectives, meanings could be very different, shaped by existing diplomacy, trade networks, sovereignty and local interests.
A modern viewer could easily read the handshake as a simple celebration of friendship.
The actual history is more complicated.
The Louisiana Purchase was an agreement between the United States and France involving territory inhabited by numerous sovereign Indigenous peoples who were not parties to the transaction.
The Lewis and Clark expedition entered those homelands carrying diplomatic messages from a government claiming new authority over the region.
The Peace Medal nickel therefore depicts a real historical diplomatic symbol, but the symbol belongs to a period of expanding U.S. power and profound consequences for Native nations.
Norman E. Nemeth Creates the Coin Reverse
U.S. Mint sculptor-engraver Norman E. Nemeth designed and sculpted the Peace Medal reverse.
His task required adapting medallic artwork from the early nineteenth century to a modern five-cent coin.
The original peace medal was much larger than a nickel. Reducing its central imagery to a circulating coin required simplifying and balancing the design so it would remain legible after mass production and wear.
Although the reverse changed dramatically, the obverse remained familiar in 2004.
Felix Schlag's Jefferson portrait continued to appear.
Schlag had won the 1938 competition to redesign the five-cent coin after the Buffalo nickel era.
His original portrait would survive the two 2004 reverse changes before the obverse itself received a major change in 2005.
Schlag was a German-born artist who immigrated to the United States.
His winning 1938 nickel design paired Jefferson with Monticello, the plantation home Jefferson designed and repeatedly modified near Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Mint required revisions to Schlag's original Monticello treatment before production.
The resulting coin became one of the longest-running matched obverse-reverse designs in U.S. circulating coinage.
That longevity is why the Peace Medal reverse looked so startling in 2004.
The redesign was visual, not metallurgical.
The Peace Medal nickel retained the standard modern five-cent composition of 75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel.
It weighed 5.000 grams and measured 21.21 millimeters in diameter.
Its edge remained plain.
These specifications preserved compatibility with vending machines and other coin-handling equipment even as the artwork changed.
The Peace Medal nickel was made for circulation at both Philadelphia and Denver.
Unlike a low-mintage commemorative sold only to collectors, this was a genuine circulating redesign intended to appear in everyday change.
Hundreds of millions were produced.
That widespread distribution was central to the program's educational purpose: Americans did not need to order a special Mint product to encounter the new design.
Finding One in Change Was Part of the Experience
When the Peace Medal nickel entered circulation, people began checking their change for the unfamiliar reverse.
That experience echoed the excitement generated by the 50 State Quarters Program, which had begun in 1999.
The State Quarters demonstrated that changing circulating designs could turn ordinary transactions into collecting opportunities.
The Westward Journey nickels brought the same idea to the five-cent denomination.
For much of the twentieth century, circulating U.S. coin designs changed infrequently.
The success of the State Quarters altered public expectations.
People became accustomed to searching for new reverses, filling albums and learning small pieces of history through coins.
The Westward Journey series extended that model while telling a connected historical narrative rather than issuing fifty separate state designs.
Later in 2004, the Peace Medal reverse gave way to the Keelboat design.
The coin depicted the vessel associated with the Corps of Discovery's journey up the Missouri River.
The transition moved the story from diplomacy to exploration.
Collectors suddenly had two different 2004 Jefferson nickels to find from each circulation mint.
The program became even more dramatic in 2005.
A new obverse showed a more contemporary Jefferson portrait, while the reverses depicted an American bison and a Pacific coastal scene accompanied by the phrase OCEAN IN VIEW! O! THE JOY!
The bison deliberately recalled one of America's most beloved earlier five-cent designs, the Buffalo nickel of 1913–1938.
By this point, virtually every major visual element of the familiar Jefferson nickel had temporarily changed.
Monticello Returns in 2006
The law required Monticello to return.
In 2006, the Mint introduced the “Return to Monticello” nickel.
The reverse restored a newly sharpened version of the familiar building, while the obverse adopted Jamie Franki's forward-facing portrait of Jefferson based on a Rembrandt Peale image.
That basic pairing continues on circulating nickels today.
The Westward Journey period therefore forms a clearly bounded design experiment between the classic Schlag nickel and the modern Jefferson nickel.
The Mint capitalized on the historical importance of January 20 by producing an Official First Day Coin Cover.
The product contained two Peace Medal nickels struck at Philadelphia on the first day of production, January 20, 2004.
They were mounted in a presentation card with a postage stamp and official cancellation connected to the Lewis and Clark bicentennial.
This transformed an otherwise common circulating coin into a collectible tied to a documented production date.
For most circulating coins, it is impossible to know the exact day an individual piece was struck.
Coins pour from presses, enter bulk containers and become mixed during handling and distribution.
A Mint product specifically certifying coins as first-day strikes therefore creates an unusual connection between an individual object and a known moment in production.
That makes January 20 more than an administrative date in a press release. Some surviving coins are directly linked to it.
Rarity and importance are not the same thing.
A circulated Peace Medal nickel can still be found inexpensively. Enormous numbers were produced, and collectors saved many examples when they were new.
Yet the coin marks a major design transition.
It was the first circulating Jefferson nickel reverse redesign since 1938 and the opening issue of a multi-year experiment that reshaped the denomination.
For a type collector, that historical position matters even when the coin itself is readily available.
Condition Can Still Matter
Although ordinary examples are common, collectors distinguish sharply among grades and strike quality.
Coins intended for circulation can acquire contact marks during bulk handling before they ever reach a pocket.
High-grade pieces with clean surfaces, strong luster and sharp details are scarcer than their enormous mintages might suggest.
Special collector products, proofs and high-grade certified examples create additional collecting paths beyond simply finding one in change.
One of the Peace Medal nickel's most interesting qualities is the collision of two eras.
The coin was struck by high-speed twenty-first-century presses in huge quantities, yet its reverse imagery reaches back to Jefferson's presidency.
The clasped hands, pipe and tomahawk come from an age when the United States Mint itself was barely a decade old.
A modern circulating nickel thus became a vehicle for reproducing an early federal medallic design.
January 20, 2004 marks the moment the Jefferson nickel began its first major circulating redesign since 1938.
The Peace Medal reverse was only the first step. Keelboat, Bison and Ocean in View designs would follow, and Jefferson's portrait would change as well.
But the transformation started with the first-day mintage in Philadelphia.
The coin linked Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark, Native diplomacy and modern circulating coin design in a single five-cent piece.
For sixty-six years, Americans had known what the back of a Jefferson nickel looked like.
On January 20, 2004, the Mint began changing that expectation.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
2000 — Mint Announces Sacagawea Dollar Retail Circulation Partnership — The U.S. Mint announced its partnership with Wal-Mart to place the new Sacagawea Golden Dollar into everyday circulation nationwide.