19th Century American chopmarks?
MrEureka
Posts: 24,328 ✭✭✭✭✭
Would it be fair to say that merchants countermarked coins primarily to validate them, so that they and that they could spend them more easily, and so that people knew the coins would be acceptable in commerce, at least at the given merchant's location? Same as chopmarks in the Orient. Doesn't mean there couldn't have been an advertising angle as well, but the validation angle seems like it would have been the primary functional purpose.
Andy Lustig
Doggedly collecting coins of the Central American Republic.
Visit the Society of US Pattern Collectors at USPatterns.com.
Doggedly collecting coins of the Central American Republic.
Visit the Society of US Pattern Collectors at USPatterns.com.
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If it is fair to say that validation was the primary reason for counterstamps as you propose, then would it follow that the citizens were most concerned with large cents and the other minor non-silver coinage as those account for the vast majority of U.S. counterstamps? Were the local economies (which also used quantities of half and large cents for washers and other early construction uses) that leery of bad copper and even worse nickel?
US merchant counterstamps were for advertising or in a few cases testing punches, as far as I know.
Except in the case of the Ephraim Brasher counterstamps in the 1780s's those were validation chops akin to what was going on in Asia.
It has been my impression, from reading many coin related publications, that the counterstamps on U.S. coins were mainly, almost exclusively, for advertising. One exception noted above, the Brasher counterstamps. Cheers, RickO
I doubt that it was done for validation purposes. Test cuts were a lot simpler.
Agreed. In this regard, they are different than Chinese chopmarks.