I'm pretty confident that I'm not the first person to do this, but I have been reading up on the US presidents for a while now and the thought occurred to me that I should try to get a coin from each presidency. It helps bring out the historical dimension of coins for me and allows me the chance to hold something from the era that I'm currently reading about. I had to impose some rules to make it more interesting. First, I will get one coin from each administration and I won't count overlaps between presidents. For instance, there are 2 times that a "year of 3 presidents" occurred: 1841 and 1881. Those 2 years saw an outgoing president, the death of the incoming president and the vice president assuming the presidency. 1841 included Van Buren, Henry Harrison and Tyler. 1881 included Hayes, Garfield and Arthur. For this collection, I'm not allowing an 1881 to count for all three presidents. So 1841 and 1881 become "key dates" of a sort because I have to have those dates to complete the set. I'm also trying to get as high grade examples as possible. I'm allowing some major flexibility on the earliest dates, of course, to keep costs down. As of last tally I have coins from 23 of 45 presidencies that I consider acceptable given their date, cost and condition. I'm curious if this presidential type set will also produce a general US type set. We'll see. Many combinations and variations exist for completing this set, so everyone could have their own twist on it. Some examples so far: Washington 1789 - 1797 None yet for Adams Jefferson 1801 - 1809 None yet for Madison Monroe 1817 - 1825 (very bad white balancing on this photo) Quincy Adams 1825 - 1829 Jackson 1829 - 1837 Skip a few more here... Fillmore 1850 - 1853 And skip a few more... Buchanan 1857 - 1861 Lincoln 1861 - 1865 And so on. I'll stop here. I'm sure others already have multiple examples from each presidency in their vast collections. Regardless, this is another variation on a type set that I'm finding an interesting challenge. To make it even more interesting, I'm also going to try not to duplicate types across the set, but I'm sure that will be the first rule that I break. I also just ordered an 1881-S Morgan Dollar to fill one of those "key" date slots. So I guess we'll see...
Always enjoy learning the 'why' behind peoples type sets. Hope you continue to update as your collection grows.
While I have never pursued completing it, I have gone through my collection to see how many presidents I have. Thanks for posting, I may have to try to complete it!
Thanks for the comments, everyone. What partially inspired this was reading the "American Presidents" series, which covers all of the presidents from Washington to W. Bush (no Obama book has appeared yet) in shorter volumes that summarize each president's life and administration. I have read 8 of the books so far in chronological order. The next book happens to cover a "key date" president, William Henry Harrison, who died after only 31 days in office in 1841.
