NOVEMBER 15
1938•Jefferson Nickel
2007•James Madison Presidential $1
The Jefferson Nickel Enters Circulation
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On November 15, 1938, the new Jefferson five-cent coin was released for circulation, replacing the Buffalo nickel after a 25-year run. The coin introduced Thomas Jefferson’s portrait to everyday American money and placed his Virginia home, Monticello, on the reverse. With modifications over the decades, the Jefferson nickel would become one of the longest-running designs in United States coinage.
The change marked more than the arrival of another presidential portrait. It closed the era of James Earle Fraser’s rugged Buffalo nickel, introduced a design selected through a national competition, and created a coin that would soon undergo dramatic wartime changes in composition.
Production of Jefferson nickels had begun earlier in the fall of 1938. November 15 is significant because it marks the coin’s public circulation release—the point at which the new design moved from Mint presses into American commerce.
The Buffalo Nickel Had Reached Its Legal Minimum
The Jefferson nickel replaced one of the most admired designs in American coinage: the Buffalo, or Indian Head, nickel.
James Earle Fraser’s design had debuted in 1913. The obverse featured a composite Native American portrait, while the reverse showed an American bison.
Artistically, the coin became an icon.
Technically, it could be troublesome.
The design’s relief and placement of important details created production and wear problems. Dates on heavily circulated pieces often disappeared. Mint officials had also dealt with difficulties involving dies and striking quality.
By 1938, the Buffalo nickel had completed the 25-year period during which a coin design generally could not be changed without congressional authorization.
The Treasury therefore had authority to replace it administratively.
Why Thomas Jefferson?
Thomas Jefferson was an obvious candidate for national coinage.
He had written the Declaration of Independence, served as the nation’s first Secretary of State, become the third President of the United States, and played a central role in the early republic.
He also had a direct connection to American monetary history.
Jefferson strongly supported a decimal system of currency. The federal coinage system established in the 1790s—with dollars divided into 100 cents—reflected the rational decimal approach he had advocated.
Placing Jefferson on the five-cent coin therefore connected a Founding Father with a monetary system he had helped conceptualize.
Rather than simply assign the new nickel to a Mint engraver, the Treasury announced an open competition in 1938.
The requirements were specific.
The obverse had to feature an authentic portrait of Thomas Jefferson. The reverse had to depict Monticello, Jefferson’s home near Charlottesville, Virginia.
The competition offered a $1,000 prize for the winning design.
Hundreds of artists submitted entries.
The winner was Felix Schlag, a German-born sculptor who had immigrated to the United States.
Felix Oscar Schlag was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1891 and trained as an artist and sculptor.
He came to the United States in the 1920s and eventually settled in the Chicago area.
Winning the Jefferson nickel competition gave him a permanent place in American numismatic history.
Schlag’s portrait of Jefferson was based on a bust by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, whose life portrait of Jefferson is among the most important visual records of the statesman.
For the reverse, Schlag depicted Monticello from the front, emphasizing its famous dome and neoclassical façade.
The Original Winning Design Was Changed
Winning a coin competition does not necessarily mean the submitted design reaches production unchanged.
Mint officials required Schlag to revise elements of his proposal.
His original Monticello view had a more dynamic perspective, and his lettering had a distinctive modern style. The Mint preferred a straighter frontal view of the building and more conventional lettering.
Schlag made the requested changes.
The result became the familiar Jefferson nickel released in 1938.
For decades, his initials did not appear on the coin. The Mint finally added “FS” beneath Jefferson’s bust in 1966, formally crediting the designer.
The 1938 obverse presents Jefferson in left-facing profile.
“IN GOD WE TRUST” appears along the left rim. “LIBERTY” and the date appear to the right, separated by a small star.
The portrait is restrained and formal.
Unlike the allegorical Liberty portraits that dominated nineteenth-century American coinage, Jefferson is an identifiable historical person. The design continued the twentieth-century shift toward placing national leaders on circulating coins.
Lincoln had appeared on the cent in 1909, Washington on the quarter in 1932, and Jefferson now joined them in 1938.
The reverse depicts Monticello, the plantation home Jefferson designed and repeatedly modified over much of his life.
The building is one of the most recognizable examples of early American neoclassical architecture.
Below it appears the name “MONTICELLO,” followed by “FIVE CENTS” and “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” The motto “E PLURIBUS UNUM” arcs above.
The architecture is unusually specific for a circulating coin. Rather than a symbolic temple or generic government building, the reverse identifies an actual historic residence.
Monticello would remain the defining reverse image of the Jefferson nickel for generations.
Production Begins Before Release
The Mint began producing Jefferson nickels before the public saw them in circulation.
Philadelphia began striking the new coins in early October 1938, followed by Denver and San Francisco.
This creates an important date distinction.
A production date records when presses began making coins. A release date records when the coins were officially placed into circulation.
For a calendar of American coin history, both can be meaningful. The master chronology selects November 15 because it represents the Jefferson nickel’s public debut.
Contemporary numismatic references identify November 15, 1938 as the release date for the new Jefferson nickel.
Americans receiving the coins would have encountered a dramatic change.
The bison and Native American portrait that had defined the denomination since 1913 were gone. In their place were a Founding Father and one of the nation’s most famous historic homes.
Because nickels circulated heavily in vending machines, streetcars, shops, and countless small transactions, the new design spread rapidly through daily life.
Jefferson nickels dated 1938 were struck at Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco.
Philadelphia coins carried no mintmark, following the normal convention of the period.
Denver pieces carry a small “D,” while San Francisco pieces carry an “S.” On early Jefferson nickels, the mintmark appears on the reverse to the right of Monticello.
The 1938-D and 1938-S issues had much smaller mintages than Philadelphia and became natural targets for collectors assembling complete date-and-mintmark sets.
No one receiving a new Jefferson nickel in November 1938 could have known how quickly world events would change the coin.
Within three years, the United States would enter World War II.
Nickel metal was important to wartime industry, particularly in steel alloys. Congress therefore authorized a temporary change in the five-cent coin’s composition.
Beginning in 1942, the Mint produced special wartime nickels made of 56 percent copper, 35 percent silver, and 9 percent manganese.
For the first and only time in the denomination’s history, circulating five-cent coins contained substantial silver.
The Wartime Mintmarks
The wartime composition also produced one of the most useful identification features in U.S. coinage.
A large mintmark was placed above Monticello’s dome.
Philadelphia used a “P,” marking the first time the Philadelphia Mint placed a “P” mintmark on a U.S. coin.
Denver used “D,” and San Francisco used “S.”
The oversized marks allowed the government to identify the altered-composition coins easily, potentially making it simpler to withdraw them after the war.
Today, the large mintmark instantly tells collectors that a Jefferson nickel dated 1942–1945 is a silver wartime issue—provided it is one of the changed-composition pieces.
The Buffalo nickel lasted 25 years.
The basic Jefferson-Monticello design lasted far longer.
For more than six decades after 1938, the nickel changed relatively little. There were refinements to the portrait, lettering, relief, and details, but a person from 1940 would have easily recognized a nickel from 2000.
That continuity made the Jefferson nickel one of the most familiar objects in American commerce.
It also created a long, approachable collecting series containing common dates, scarce issues, proofs, wartime silver pieces, doubled dies, repunched mintmarks, and condition rarities.
One of the most distinctive areas of Jefferson nickel collecting involves the steps of Monticello.
The small architectural details at the building’s base often failed to strike sharply or became quickly worn.
Collectors therefore prize coins showing complete, uninterrupted step detail.
Professional grading services recognize special designations such as “Full Steps” for qualifying Mint State Jefferson nickels.
This is a good example of how a seemingly minor design element can become central to collecting a series.
The building Schlag placed on the reverse did more than identify Jefferson’s home—it created one of the denomination’s principal measures of strike quality.
The 2004–2005 Westward Journey Nickels
After more than 65 years of visual stability, the Jefferson nickel changed dramatically in 2004 and 2005.
The Westward Journey Nickel Series commemorated the bicentennials of the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Temporary reverses replaced Monticello with designs including the Peace Medal, keelboat, American bison, and Pacific Ocean scene.
Jefferson’s portrait also changed in 2005, first to a right-facing image based on a Houdon bust.
The experiments prepared the way for a permanent new obverse.
In 2006, the Mint introduced Jamie Franki’s forward-facing Jefferson portrait.
The image was based on an 1800 Rembrandt Peale portrait and gives Jefferson a more direct, contemporary appearance.
Monticello returned to the reverse, using a restored and sharpened version of Schlag’s classic design.
Thus the modern Jefferson nickel looks quite different from the coin released in 1938, but its historical identity remains intact: Jefferson on one side, Monticello on the other.
The Jefferson nickel is unusual in how directly its two sides relate.
The obverse shows a person. The reverse shows that person’s home.
Monticello was not merely where Jefferson lived. He designed and redesigned it, using architecture to express his intellectual interests and classical ideals.
The building and its surrounding property are now a major historic site.
Because of the nickel, generations of Americans who never visited Virginia still became familiar with the name and façade of Monticello.
Few coins have done more to place a specific historic building into the national visual vocabulary.
The Five-Cent Coin Before Jefferson
The denomination itself has a history older than the Jefferson nickel.
The United States initially used silver half dimes as its five-cent coin.
During and after the Civil War, the government introduced a larger copper-nickel five-cent piece in 1866. The new coin eventually inherited the informal name “nickel” from its metal content.
The Shield nickel was followed by the Liberty Head or “V” nickel in 1883 and the Buffalo nickel in 1913.
When Jefferson arrived in 1938, he became the fourth major design family of the copper-nickel five-cent denomination.
The five-cent coin has repeatedly faced the same economic forces that affect other low denominations: inflation, changing metal costs, and reduced purchasing power.
Yet it remained an important part of American cash transactions through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
The Jefferson design’s longevity reflects that stability.
While half dollars largely disappeared from routine commerce and the cent eventually reached the end of circulating production in 2025, the nickel remained a familiar pocket coin.
That makes its 1938 debut an event with unusually long consequences.
November 15, 1938 was the day Americans began receiving a new five-cent coin.
The Buffalo nickel, one of the artistic triumphs of the early twentieth-century coinage renaissance, gave way to Felix Schlag’s Thomas Jefferson and Monticello.
The new coin would soon be altered by World War II, would introduce the Philadelphia “P” mintmark on wartime silver issues, would remain visually stable for decades, and would eventually be reimagined during the Westward Journey series.
Yet the basic concept survived.
Thomas Jefferson still appears on the nickel. Monticello still anchors the reverse.
What entered circulation on November 15, 1938 became one of the most durable identities in American coinage.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
2007 — James Madison Presidential $1 — James Madison dollar entered circulation, completing the first year of the Presidential $1 Coin Program.