A TEXAS-SIZED FUGIO CENT

There is a Fugio Cent in Texas that no collector will ever be able to add to their collection. It’s six feet in diameter! And it is embedded in the floor of Dallas’s Parkland Hall, a historic hospital now being renovated for business offices. The massive bas-relief is the creation of sculptor Deran Wright who chose the obverse of the Colonial Copper, originally engraved by Abel Buel, inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s statement “We Are One.”

Creating floor medallions by American artists is not new. They have been modeled by sculptors, often by prominent art medallists. In 1908 Victor D. Brenner created the seal of the Cleveland Trust Company which was embedded in the floor of the bank’s new building. The seal was donated by Ambrose Swasey, a director of the bank, who was also the subject of one of Brenner’s portrait medals.

More recently medallist Geri Gould sculpted a floor medallion in 2008 for the La Crescenta Public Library commissioned by the Historical Society of Crescenta Valley, north of Los Angeles. Included in her design were three portraits of the area’s historical past. The bronze medallion was surrounded by a granite and marble inlay in a compass design.

Here in Waterbury Connecticut the old Scovill Manufacturing buildings were demolished to build a giant new shopping mall. Since Scovill had manufactured tokens for over a century -- the major maker of Civil War tokens -- the firm’s 1829 store card was selected to be reproduced oversize and embedded in the floor in half a dozen floor locations.

Perhaps E-Sylum readers know of other floor medallions in American buildings. It would be interesting to learn of any other floor medallions reproduced a numismatic item.

Wright’s new Fugio floor medallion was illustrated this week in National Sculpture Society’s Sculpture News at News@NationalSculpture.org

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