America the Beautiful® National Parks 5 Piece Quarter Iowa

This set of 5 quarters commemorate America's national parks with unique reverse designs and a variety of finishes. In 2010, the United States Mint began a 56 quarter program featuring designs depicting national parks and other national sites as part of the United States Mint America the Beautiful Quarters Program. Quarters will be issued in the order that they were first established as a national site. The program expected to continue through 2022. Included are: Brilliant Uncirculated coins (1 each from P- and D-Mint) 24K gold plated coin (Random Mint) Colorized coin (Random Mint) Hologrammed coin (Random Mint)

Effigy Mounds National Monument was established in 1949. The park protects one of the largest remaining concentrations of ancient American Indian earthworks in the United States. It is considered a sacred landscape by members of many modern-day tribes whose ancestors once lived here.

The majority of the mounds were constructed between one thousand and two thousand years ago — often to inter the dead, but sometimes for ceremonial purposes, or to tell important stories.

The park is home to more than 200 mounds in a wide variety of forms, including more than 30 animal or bird-shaped “effigy” mounds for which the park is named. Often more than 100 feet long individually, many of these animal and bird shaped mounds are perched high atop rugged bluffs overlooking the adjacent Mississippi River. Aside from preserving these tangible links to an ancient and highly creative people, the park features outstanding views of the Mississippi River Valley, and hosts many of the native plant and animal communities that sustained people in this area for millennia.