The New 2010 State Park Quarters

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The two coin collectors in my family will be pleased to learn that the U.S. Mint is launching a new series of quarters next year, all devoted to the "America the Beautiful" theme.

The first one is dedicated to Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas, and the second one will feature Yellowstone National Park. In all, there will be 56 new quarters in the series featuring each state and territory, The New York Times reports.

The coins will start with the earliest sites approved by Congress and follow chronologically. Yellowstone is the first national park, the Times reports, but Hot Springs was set aside as park land four decades earlier.

There will be other quarters dedicated to the Kansas prairie, the Olympic Mountains in Washington and the White Mountains in New Hampshire. The final coin in the series features the Tuskegee Airmen memorial in Alabama, and is slated to appear in 2021.

Oklahoma suggested including the Oklahoma City National Memorial, but the Mint went with the Chickasaw National Recreation Area instead, the Associated Press reports. The Mint said the Oklahoma City memorial is owned by a private foundation and not the federal government.

In a moment of unadulterated cheesiness, the head of the convention bureau in Hot Springs said the coins would be good marketing, and "the only thing that would make it better would be if we could put our Web site on the quarter."

Collecting quarters became a new hobby for some when the Mint issued its 50-state quarter series. The Mint says about 147 million people collected State Quarters, a series that began with Delaware in 1999 and ended with Hawaii last year.