FREE: 1926 S Oregon Trail Memorial Half Dollar 90% Silver !!MUST SEE!!

The listing, 1926 S Oregon Trail Memorial Half Dollar 90% Silver !!MUST SEE!! has ended.

Up for auction is a 1926 S Oregon Trail half dollar... Awesome coin with GREAT history.... 100 % Authentic!!

The Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar was a fifty-cent piece struck intermittently by the United States Bureau of the Mint between 1926 and 1939. The coin was designed by Laura Gardin Fraser and James Earle Fraser, and commemorates those who traveled the Oregon Trail and settled the Pacific Coast of the United States in the mid-19th century. Struck over a lengthy period in small numbers per year, the many varieties produced came to be considered a ripoff by coin collectors, and led to the end, for the time, of the commemorative coin series.

Ohio-born Ezra Meeker had traveled the Trail with his family in 1852 and spent the final two decades of his long life before his death in 1928 publicizing the Oregon Trail, that it should not be forgotten. In 1926, at age 95, he appeared before a Senate committee, requesting that the government issue a commemorative coin that could be sold to raise money for markers to show where the Trail had been. The coin had originally been thought of by Idahoans, led by Dr. Minnie Howard, seeking to further preservation work at Fort Hall; Meeker broadened the idea. Congress authorized six million half dollars, and placed no restriction on when or at what mint the coins would be struck. Meeker's Oregon Trail Memorial Association (OTMA) had tens of thousands of pieces struck in 1926 and 1928, and did not sell them all. Nevertheless, most years between 1933 and 1939, it had small quantities of the half dollar coined, in some years from all three operating mints to produce mintmarked varieties, and raised prices considerably.


Value
50 cents (0.50 US dollars)
Mass
12.5 g
Diameter
30.61 mm (1.20 in)
Thickness
2.15 mm (0.08 in)
Edge
Reeded
Composition
90.0% silver
10.0% copper
Silver
0.36169 troy oz
Years of minting
1926, 1928, 1933, 1934, 1936–1939
Mint marks D, S.