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lthough the legendary folk-hero and “Wilderness Trail” blazer Daniel Boone is often connected with Kentucky, it was present-day Missouri that he called home for the last quarter-century of his life. By the time he died at the age of 86 in 1820, Missouri had come a long way from the untamed part of Spanish America that Boone had settled in at the end of the 18th century. This fertile and well-watered area now contained enough people to warrant consideration as a state. But Missouri was a slaveholding territory, and admission to the Union threatened to upset the delicate balance of power in Congress between slave and free states. After extended, rancorous debate and legislative horse-trading, the “Missouri Compromise” was reached. It pleased no one, but it did allow Missouri to enter the Union in 1821 and retain its “peculiar institution,” but only after Maine was granted admission as a free state.
A century later, on March 4, 1921, Congress authorized the minting of 250,000 half dollars commemorating Missouri's admission to the Union. Appropriately, initial distribution of the coins was to take place at the Centennial Exposition and State Fair scheduled for that August in Missouri's first capital, Sedalia. James Montgomery, chairman of the Missouri Centennial Exposition Committee, suggested that the estimated $1,750 production cost for design and die preparation be borne by striking 5,000 special coins with a 2?4 designation, signifying Missouri's admission to the Union as the 24th state. After these specially struck coins were produced, the 2?4 designation would be effaced from the dies, and all subsequent coins would lack this feature, thus creating an instant rarity.
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