SEPTEMBER 10
2009•Zachary Taylor Presidential $1
2014•Franklin D. Roosevelt $1 Coin Cover
Philadelphia Strikes Its First Zachary Taylor Presidential Dollars
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On September 10, 2009, the Philadelphia Mint struck Zachary Taylor Presidential $1 Coins on what the United States Mint later documented as that facility’s first day of mintage for the issue. It was an important production milestone, but it was not the coin’s public release date. The Taylor dollar would not be released to the Federal Reserve Banks and the public until November 19.
That distinction makes September 10 a particularly useful date in American coin history. Coins have many possible “birthdays”: congressional authorization, design unveiling, first strike, first day of mintage, product sale, Federal Reserve release and ceremonial launch can all occur on different days. For the Philadelphia Zachary Taylor dollar, September 10 is specifically the documented first day of mintage.
The coin honored the 12th president of the United States, a career soldier nicknamed “Old Rough and Ready” whose military victories in the Mexican-American War propelled him into the White House. His presidency lasted only sixteen months before his death in July 1850.
The Mint’s Own Coin Cover Preserved the Date
The strongest documentation for September 10 comes from the United States Mint’s official Zachary Taylor $1 Coin Cover.
When the Mint announced that product in December 2009, it explained that the cover contained two circulating-quality Taylor dollars from the first day of mintage at each facility. The Denver coin came from September 9, 2009. The Philadelphia coin came from September 10, 2009.
The cover also carried a November 19, 2009 postmark—the date the Mint identified as the day the Taylor Presidential dollars were first released to the Federal Reserve Bank and to the public.
In one collectible package, therefore, the Mint preserved two different kinds of dates: the first production dates and the later public-release date.
First-Day-of-Mintage Is Not the Same as Release
This distinction is easy to lose when coin histories are compressed into timelines.
A mint must manufacture coins before banks and the public can receive them. Production can begin weeks or months before an official release. Finished coins may be counted, bagged, stored and staged for distribution while the Mint prepares the national launch.
That is exactly what happened with the Taylor dollar. Denver began production on September 9. Philadelphia followed on September 10. Yet the United States Mint did not release the new design to the Federal Reserve until November 19.
The ceremonial launch came later still, on November 24, 2009—Taylor’s 225th birthday—in Orange, Virginia.
So September 10 should not be described as the day the Zachary Taylor dollar “entered circulation.” It is the Philadelphia first-day-of-mintage milestone.
Zachary Taylor was the fourth president honored in 2009 and the twelfth president in the Presidential $1 Coin Program.
The year began with William Henry Harrison, followed by John Tyler and James K. Polk. Taylor completed the year’s sequence.
The program had begun in 2007 under the Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005. Four presidents were honored each year, generally in the order they served. The rapidly changing designs were intended to build public interest in the dollar coin while presenting a chronological tour of presidential history.
By the time the Taylor dies reached production, more than two years of Presidential dollars had already familiarized Americans with the format: a large presidential portrait on the obverse, the Statue of Liberty on the reverse, a golden color and inscriptions placed partly on the edge.
Zachary Taylor: Soldier Before President
Zachary Taylor was born in Virginia in 1784, but his family moved to Kentucky while he was still young.
He entered the United States Army in 1808 and spent roughly four decades in military service. His assignments took him through frontier posts and several conflicts, including the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War and the Second Seminole War.
Taylor developed a reputation for sharing the hardships of his soldiers and for an informal appearance that contrasted with the polished image expected of senior officers. The nickname “Old Rough and Ready” captured that persona.
His national fame exploded during the Mexican-American War.
Taylor commanded American forces in northern Mexico and won important victories at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey and Buena Vista.
The Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847 became especially important to his public image. Taylor’s smaller force resisted a much larger Mexican army under Antonio López de Santa Anna, and the victory helped turn the general into a national hero.
In an era when military fame could translate rapidly into political power, the Whig Party nominated Taylor for president in 1848 despite his limited political experience.
He won the election and became the 12th president on March 4, 1849.
Taylor entered office as the United States struggled with the consequences of the territorial acquisitions made after the Mexican-American War.
The central question was whether slavery would expand into the new western territories.
Taylor was a southern slaveholder, but his position as president did not align neatly with the most aggressive pro-slavery demands. He favored admitting California and New Mexico as states without a prolonged territorial stage, an approach that could allow them to determine the slavery question through their own constitutions.
Sectional tensions intensified. Southern political leaders discussed resistance and even secession, while Congress struggled toward the package of measures later known as the Compromise of 1850.
Taylor did not live to see that compromise enacted.
Sixteen Months in Office
On July 4, 1850, Taylor attended Independence Day observances connected with the Washington Monument on an extremely hot day.
He soon became severely ill and died on July 9.
His presidency had lasted only about sixteen months, making it one of the shortest in American history. Vice President Millard Fillmore succeeded him.
Taylor was the second president to die in office, after William Henry Harrison—another military hero whose portrait had appeared earlier in the same 2009 Presidential dollar sequence.
The Taylor dollar thus honored a presidency that was brief but situated at a critical point in the national conflict over slavery and western expansion.
United States Mint Sculptor-Engraver Don Everhart designed and sculpted the Zachary Taylor obverse.
The portrait is accompanied by ZACHARY TAYLOR, IN GOD WE TRUST, 12TH PRESIDENT and 1849–1850.
Everhart also created the Statue of Liberty reverse shared across the Presidential $1 Coin Program. The reverse bears UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and the denomination $1.
Having the same artist responsible for both the individual Taylor portrait and the common series reverse gave the coin an unusually unified design authorship.
The Presidential dollars used edge inscriptions as a major design feature.
On the 2009 Taylor dollar, the edge carried the date 2009, E PLURIBUS UNUM and the mint mark identifying Philadelphia, Denver or San Francisco production.
IN GOD WE TRUST had appeared on the edge of the earliest Presidential dollars. Congress later required the motto to appear on the obverse or reverse, and beginning in 2009 it was moved to the obverse.
The edge arrangement gave the two main faces more room for large sculptural designs, but it also created a new collecting feature. Presidential dollar edges became objects of close examination for missing lettering, doubled lettering and other production anomalies.
Why the Philadelphia “P” Was on the Edge
The September 10 Philadelphia coins carry a P mint mark, but collectors looking only at the obverse and reverse will not find it.
The mint mark is incused on the edge with the other edge inscriptions.
This makes the Taylor dollar very different from most familiar modern U.S. coins, where the mint mark appears somewhere on one of the two principal faces.
The unusual location also mattered for the Mint’s coin-cover program. A collector could compare first-day Philadelphia and Denver examples of the same design while the P and D identifiers remained part of the edge treatment.
September 10 belongs specifically to Philadelphia.
The Mint’s documentation states that Denver’s first day of mintage for the Taylor dollar was September 9, one day earlier.
That does not make Denver’s coins a different design or a separate issue in the ordinary sense. It simply records the independent production schedules of the two facilities.
For a collector interested in first-day production, however, the dates matter. The Mint deliberately selected examples from those first production days for the official coin cover.
Those documented dates give modern numismatists something that is often impossible for older coinage: an official federal record identifying the exact first day on which each mint facility produced a particular circulating design.
More than two months after Philadelphia’s first-day mintage, the Taylor dollar reached its public-release milestone.
The United States Mint states that it released Zachary Taylor Presidential $1 Coins to the Federal Reserve Bank on November 19, 2009. The Mint also began accepting orders for 25-coin rolls that day.
Those rolls contained circulating-quality coins from either Philadelphia or Denver and were sold in Mint packaging identifying the facility of origin.
This was the date on which the Taylor design officially entered the distribution system for public use—not September 10.
November 24: A Birthday Launch in Virginia
The ceremonial launch occurred on November 24 in Orange, Virginia, on the 225th anniversary of Taylor’s birth.
United States Mint Deputy Director Andy Brunhart participated, along with state and local officials and a descendant of President Taylor. A ceremonial coin pour introduced hundreds of new Taylor dollars to attendees.
The event was part of Zachary Taylor Appreciation Day and included music by the 392nd Army Band.
This produced a three-stage chronology worth preserving:
September 10: first day of Philadelphia mintage.
November 19: release to the Federal Reserve and public.
November 24: ceremonial launch in Virginia.
Each date describes a different event.
The official Taylor coin cover turned those production and release dates into a collectible narrative.
It contained one Philadelphia and one Denver circulating-quality Taylor dollar from each facility’s first day of mintage. The coins were mounted on a display card and paired with a 44-cent postage stamp.
The November 19 postmark commemorated the public-release date.
The product therefore combined numismatics and philately while documenting the chronology of the coin itself. For modern researchers, the Mint’s announcement for the cover is particularly valuable because it explicitly records the first-day-of-mintage dates that might otherwise be overlooked in favor of the more publicized November launch.
The Presidential $1 Coin Program was not intended solely for collectors.
The Mint and Federal Reserve hoped the changing presidential designs would encourage greater use of dollar coins in everyday transactions. Banks could obtain unmixed rolls of each new design around the release period, giving businesses and the public a chance to encounter the newest president without sorting through older dollars.
But the United States had long preferred the one-dollar bill. The Susan B. Anthony dollar and Sacagawea dollar had already demonstrated how difficult it was to change that habit.
Presidential dollars generated enormous collecting interest, but widespread transactional use remained limited.
From Mass Circulation to Collector Production
The Taylor dollar belongs to the early circulation era of the Presidential program.
By 2011, inventories of dollar coins had grown dramatically. The Treasury Department announced that production of Presidential dollars for general circulation would be suspended, beginning with later issues in the series. Coins would continue to be produced for collectors in the quantities needed to satisfy numismatic demand.
That makes 2009 issues such as Taylor representative of the program’s original ambition: millions of rotating presidential designs manufactured for actual circulation.
The September 10 Philadelphia production was part of that large logistical effort.
For nineteenth-century coins, numismatists often reconstruct production chronologies from delivery warrants, die records, correspondence and surviving specimens.
Modern Mint documentation can be far more precise.
A first-day-of-mintage date tells us when a particular facility began turning prepared blanks into finished coins of a new design. It separates the manufacturing history from the marketing history.
That distinction becomes especially important in a calendar project. If September 10 were casually described as the Taylor dollar’s “release,” it would conflict with the Mint’s own November 19 release record. Calling it the Philadelphia first day of mintage preserves both dates accurately.
September 10, 2009 was the day the Philadelphia Mint began producing Zachary Taylor Presidential $1 Coins, according to the United States Mint’s official first-day-of-mintage documentation.
The coins would remain behind the scenes for weeks before their national public release. Denver had begun its Taylor production one day earlier. On November 19, the Mint released the new dollars to the Federal Reserve and the public. Five days after that, officials celebrated the coin in Virginia on Taylor’s 225th birthday.
But every circulating coin has to begin somewhere.
For the Philadelphia Zachary Taylor dollar, that beginning was September 10—when dies bearing Don Everhart’s portrait of “Old Rough and Ready” began striking the 12th president into the Presidential $1 Coin series.
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