Just snagged a RARE Monitor "primitive" CWT
goose3
Posts: 11,471 ✭✭✭
and paid some pretty strong dough for it too.
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Edit: Argh! You fixed it!
Nice lookin Token... did you get it from Ernie Latter? Or somewhere else?
42/92
I'm just starting to get in to the CWT's.
Don't know much about them yet but did pick up one that i thought was pretty cool.
Tbig
Henry D. Higgins made tokens in Northern Indiana. His dies were from two sources. Many dies were totally by his own hand. They featured uneven and sometimes incomplete lettering combined with an array of blooms, horns and leaves. Higgins copied other designs from tokens that he acquired. monitor variety #238 was one of those.
No one is really sure how Higgins made his copies. #238 is a copy of #237. He probably made a mold of a #237 token. When made he it, he could not get the dentiles (rim design) to take so he made them himself. You will note that they are uneven.
Some people have speculated that Higgins got his hands on the matrix dies from the Scoville Company, which made CWTs. I don't think that is true because too much detail was lost on the Higgins copies. The reverse die # 405 is one of Higgins’ own creations. As his dies come, this one is less "primitive" than most.
CWT collectors did not know the identity of the maker of the Indiana primitives until Higgins’ granddaughter came forward in the 1970s. She related stories about how her mother had told her stories about when she “had helped father make the coins.”
Most Indiana primitive CWTs come well worn, usually F to VF, although a number of Mint State pieces do show up now and then. It seems that these tokens circulated after the Civil War ended, which would account for their condition.
Nice token.
-YN Currently Collecting & Researching Colonial World Coins, Especially Spanish Coins, With a Great Interest in WWII Militaria.
My Ebay!