y favorite coin for this column is a Stone Mountain half dollar. After looking at many coin collections/accumulations formed in the Deep South, I have observed that when the “collection” contains an early U.S. commemorative coin, it’s likely to be a circulated Stone Mountain half dollar. As Anthony Swiatek, author of , put it, the Stone Mountain half dollar “... is abundant in EF-AU condition.” The reason why there are so many Stone Mountain commemoratives around is that the coin had a huge mintage for a commemorative, with Swiatek reporting a net distribution of 1,310,000. The only other early commemoratives with mintages of more than a million are the 1893 Columbian and
