Colonial Restrikes and Fantasies

This series gathers copies, imitations and fantasies of colonial coins made for collectors in the nineteenth century, each on its own page beside a link, in its text, to the genuine coin it imitates.

The largest group comes from Thomas Wyatt, a New York numismatist who had dies cut for copies of Massachusetts silver coins about 1856. When a run of newly "discovered" Massachusetts coins appeared that year, a Boston newspaper traced them to New York, and the Boston collector Jeremiah Colburn named a New Yorker with the initials T.W. Wyatt's first strikings were in silver, sold in sets that included an NE shilling and sixpence, Oak Tree shilling and twopence, Pine Tree sixpence, threepence and penny, and a Good Samaritan shilling. Edwin Bishop of New York later acquired the dies and struck copper pieces, and the Good Samaritan and Oak Tree mule is credited to him.

Other groups come from the same decade. Pine Tree shillings dated "1650" were offered to collectors in 1854, when a young man from Boscawen, New Hampshire showed several to Dr. Ammi Brown of Salem; the Stack's Bowers catalogue describes them as struck copies of about 1850. In Philadelphia, Montroville W. Dickeson struck copies of the Sommer Islands (Bermuda) shilling in the 1850s and paired the dies with others to make mules. In 1869 John Adams Bolen of Springfield, Massachusetts cut dies for a copy of the 1694 Carolina elephant token, and the series holds a Bolen fantasy with an elephant design.

Maker and catalogue numbers. Sydney P. Noe's studies of the Massachusetts silver coinage list many of these pieces next to the genuine dies, with letters or numbers of their own (Noe-2, Noe-L, Noe-M, Noe-Y and so on), and Noe's plates mark the Wyatt pieces as counterfeits. Kenney's numbers and the Whitman (W-) numbers that PCGS uses also identify them, and the Dickeson copies and mules carry both in their titles, as in W-15480 Kenney-1.

Metal. Genuine Massachusetts coins are silver, so the copper strikings, such as the copper Oak Tree shilling Noe-2, are told apart by their metal alone. The silver Wyatt pieces, such as the silver Oak Tree shilling Noe-2, need comparison of the dies. The genuine Sommer Islands coins are a brassy copper with a thin silver wash; Dickeson's copies come in copper, brass, nickel and white metal.

Design and date. Some pieces give themselves away at once. Massachusetts struck no penny, so the Pine Tree penny is a denomination Wyatt added to his sets. No Massachusetts coin is dated 1650, since the mint was set up in 1652. Dickeson's Sommer Islands copy has stars in its legend where the originals have stops, and a puff of smoke beside the ship.

• Wyatt copies of the Oak Tree coins: the shilling Noe-2 in silver and copper, the silver twopence (Kenney-6, W-14030), the copper twopence and the sixpence.
• Wyatt copies of the Pine Tree coins: the sixpence Noe-L in silver and copper, the silver threepence Noe-M, a copper threepence, and the penny in silver (Noe-O) and copper.
• Good Samaritan and Oak Tree: the mule struck by Edwin Bishop from Wyatt's dies, listed as a copy and as a fantasy.
• Noe imitations: the Oak Tree shilling Noe-5 and sixpence Noe-19, and the Pine Tree shillings Noe E in bronze and Noe F.
• Elder fantasies: the Pine Tree shilling Noe-Y in copper and silver, attributed to Elder by PCGS.
• "1650" Pine Tree shilling: the struck copy once owned by Mr. Getchell of Boscawen, catalogued as Noe C.
• Dickeson Sommer Islands copies: the copy itself (Kenney-1, W-15400) in copper, brass, white metal, copper-nickel and nickel, the mule with a Wuesthoff die, and the numbered mules Kenney-1 to Kenney-13.
• Bolen: the "Double Elephant" fantasy.

The metal is part of each piece's identity here, and each page names it where the PCGS listing does: silver, copper or bronze for the Massachusetts copies, imitations and fantasies; copper, brass, nickel, copper-nickel and white metal for the Dickeson copies and mules. Several pages, including the Noe imitations without a metal in their listing, leave the field empty rather than guess. None of these pieces has a recorded mintage.