Christopher Bechtler

Christopher Bechtler was born on November 29, 1782, in Pforzheim, in the German state of Baden, where he trained as a jeweler, watchmaker, and metalworker at the town's famous goldsmithing school. In 1829 he immigrated to the United States with his sons Augustus and Charles and a nephew, keeping a watchmaker's shop in Philadelphia before moving in 1830 to Rutherfordton, North Carolina, in the heart of the Carolina gold region.

The southern gold fields were then starved of coined money: miners traded raw dust and nuggets of uncertain value, and the federal mint lay far away in Philadelphia. In 1831 Bechtler opened a private mint, assaying miners' gold and striking it into $1, $2.50, and $5 pieces stamped plainly with their weight and fineness. His gold dollar, first struck in the early 1830s, preceded the U.S. Mint's own gold dollar by nearly two decades. The Bechtlers' scrupulous honesty won wide trust, and their press turned out more than two million dollars' worth of coinage between 1831 and 1840 while processing a great deal more raw gold; Bechtler dollars circulated across the South for decades and were even specified in contracts.

Bechtler died in Rutherfordton in 1843, and the mint continued under his son Augustus into the 1850s. Surviving Bechtler coins are prized by collectors today, and the family's story is preserved in Rutherfordton, where their minting house still stands.