CORNISH – The United States Mint has announced it will recreate a $20 gold coin designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1907, and a curator hopes the new version of the coin will attract more visitors to the famed American sculptor's former estate in Cornish.

Considered by many to be the most beautiful coin ever made in the United States, the high-relief Liberty Gold Piece, also known as the Double Eagle, bear the image of a woman holding a branch and a torch on one side.

"Liberty's torch represents knowledge, and the branch represents victory," said Henry Duffy, curator at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site on Route 12A in Cornish. "Of course, the knowledge she's spreading is democracy. She's spreading democracy to the world." The back of the coin features an eagle flying under the sun. On the re-issued coin, the inscription "In God We Trust" will appear above the sun, as it did on a 1908 version of the same coin.

The design will be featured on a collectible 24-karat coin intended for sale to the public in 2009. Duffy said the mint originally planned to release the coin in 2007, its 100th anniversary, but original molds had been destroyed, which delayed the process.

"In most cases there are dies," Duffy said. "A die is like a mold that is used to stamp out coins and is made of a very hard metal. The dies for Saint-Gaudens' coins don't exist, because when America went off the gold standard in 1933 - all gold coins were to be melted down - When they discovered that they didn't have these dies, they had to put this off, and so it's going to be 2009 instead." In preparing to recreate the coin, the mint will test the development of the second variation of Saint-Gaudens' design, the 27-millimeter, ultra-high relief coin with Roman numerals.

President Theodore Roosevelt selected Saint-Gaudens to improve the designs on the nation's coins, and the sculptor's first task was redesigning gold coins.

Maintaining the full artistic integrity of the Saint-Gaudens design was an arduous undertaking in 1907. The mint's first attempt - a 34-millimeter ultra-high relief coin with Roman numerals - required the coins to be 'squeezed' into a press and annealed numerous times. The coining process was impractical for mass production, and approximately 19 coins of this variety are known to exist, most of which are now in private ownership.

The United States Mint's second attempt to produce Saint-Gaudens' design - a 27- millimeter, ultra-high relief coin with Roman numerals - was in fact two $10 Gold Eagle coins melded together, thus the resulting coins were called Double Eagles and were twice as thick. The mint had no authority to strike coins of this specification in 1907, so it melted all but two or perhaps three of these coins, mint officials said.

The United States Mint's third attempt - a high-relief, 34-millimeter coin with Roman numerals - produced a coin with reduced relief that required less metal flow to fill the design and was more practical for mass production. Approximately 12,000 coins were made for collection. In 1907, an additional 361,000 coins with Arabic numerals and a lower relief were produced for circulation. These coins are now worth between $10,000 and $20,000, Duffy said.

Production of the Saint-Gaudens $20 Gold Double Eagle continued until 1932. Production of the 1933 $20 Gold Double Eagle ceased, and only one was ever lawfully issued - some 70 years later.

"It was thought that these 1933 coins were all destroyed and then one showed up and it was reclaimed by the federal government and it was resold at auction" for $7 million a few years ago, Duffy said.

Since then, 10 more 1933 coins have resurfaced, and their owners are now in litigation with the federal government over authenticity, Duffy said.

Duffy said visitors to the historic site often ask how they can acquire one of Saint-Gaudens' coins.

"They're usually disappointed when they found out how much they are," he said. "This will be helpful to us to be able to recommend this to people, so I'm sure people are going to like that." Duffy said he thinks the new coins will be a hit among seasoned and new coin collectors and may even draw more visitors to the historic site in Cornish.

"There's a lot of interesting intrigue and mystery around these coins right now," he said.