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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;hontonai, post: 238454, member: 4703&quot;]You certainly have a commemorative medal, not a coin.&nbsp; A coin normally carries a denomination and some indicia of the government issuing it.&nbsp; Washington&#039;s portrait didn&#039;t become a design element of US coinage until 135 years after the second date on that piece, when the 1932 quarter was minted.</p><p><br /></p><p>Usually commemoratives either bear two dates related by a time span of 25, 50, 100, or some other significant round number of years, or the beginning and ending dates of some historical period.</p><p><br /></p><p>While both 1769 and 1797 are significant dates in relation to Washington, they don&#039;t have any generally recognized relationship to each other.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>1797, of course, is the year he turned the presidency over to John Adams and gave his farewell address to the American people.&nbsp; In 1769 he was establishing himself as a Virginia plantation owner, and expanding his Mt. Vernon estate.&nbsp; He did foreshadow his involvement in the next decade&#039;s American Revolution by encouraging his fellow plantation owners to boycott British goods for political reasons, as a more peaceful method that - as he describes it in <a href="http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/revolution/letters/mason.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/revolution/letters/mason.html" rel="nofollow">this correspondence</a> - a resort to &quot;A--ms&quot;.</p><p><br /></p><p>Perhaps the maker of that medal was treating his early political correspondence and his subsequent withdrawal from public life as marking a special period in his life.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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