Indiana Primitives - Henry Higgins and His Copy Dies
BillJones
Posts: 33,486 ✭✭✭✭✭
Henry Higgins was jack of many trades who made Civil War tokens. He also made eye glasses, weather barometers, guns, jewelry, and false teeth. Higgins issued merchant tokens for his business, and he made tokens for other merchants as well. He also made Patriotic tokens which cannot be attributed to any specific merchant.
Higgins' tokens had three points of origin. Probably his first piece, which advertised his business, was made by Chicago, Illinois die sinker, Shubael Childs.
In what was probably a short time after that, Higgins started to make his own dies to advertise his business.
Higgins' designs came from two sources. His own designs usually had some interestingly spaced lettering, horns, flowers and flurishes. He copied some designs from tokens that had been issued by other companies. Collectively these pieces are called "Indiana Primitives," and they form an interesting subset within the Civil War token series. A fair number of Civil War token collectors are intrigued by the Higgins’ tokens and have formed a collection of them as I have done.
As near as we can determine, Higgins made his copy dies by softening the head of a steel cylinder, placing a Civil War token on it and then squeezed the design into the die face. The resulting impression was never as good as the original image because some of the details were always lost. Sometimes Higgins added or strengthened some of the detail and occasionally he added some lettering. Here are a couple of examples.
The Monitor token on the left was made by the Waterbury, Connecticut Button Company. The one on the right is Higgins’ copy.
And here is another pair that depict the U.S. Capital. The piece on the left was made by Scoville, and the token on the right was by Higgins. It seemed that he was concerned that some people might not recognize the building so he added the word "CAPITAL' at the bottom.
Here are the two Higgins tokens. The Monitor piece is a Patriotic token.
The Capital die was used on both Patriotic and Merchants Store Cards like this one.
There are a few other examples of Higgins' copy dies that I will post if there is any interest in them.
Comments
Neat stuff!
The new Patriotic Civil War Token book is just out. I am the book manager for the club. They are list at $55.
Any idea how he copied the dies? Mechanical impressions or electro-erosion (using batteries?) or something else?
NIce write up Bill. My example of the Monitor token is more worn and rather granular. Yours is very nice, all the ones I have seen images of have weakness at the centers. very informative thread. Wish I owned that "periscopic spectacles" token!
The Monitor tokens came my way when I was a dealer. If a better one came my way, I kept it and sold the lesser one. That is one of the big advantages to being a collector - dealer. The thing you had to really watch was keeping too much material. It was something I sometimes had to battle. Most of the material I handled did not interest me as a collector or was lower grade than what I already had.
The common Monitors could be purchased in Mint State for well under $100 when I was dealer. They were mostly R-1s except for the Indiana Primitive which has always been pricey for a token.
The late Steve Tannenbaum told me about a collector who was able to make copy dies by using an existing Civil War token to make them. You used to the token to make the image in the soften steal and annealed it. Tannebaum told him to "knock it off." I don't know of that collector took the hint.
My guess is Higgins did the same thing.
Great thread Bill and thanks for the history behind these tokens.... I need to look up those 'periscope' glasses... not sure how they worked... Cheers, RickO
I love Bill's posts. Always informative and enlightening.
Thanks Bill!
Fun read Bill. Thanks for sharing.
Old Thread Update
Great topic and information @BillJones. I was just reading about Henry Darius Higgins of Mishakawa, ID, and what Steve Hayden called his "ingenious method of creating his own copy die." Instead of just posting and asking about this I did a Google search and this thread came up.
How many dies are attributed to Higgins? The one I was just looking at was Fuld-175, a copy of Scovill's Fuld-173.
Can tokens from these copy dies be identified? Is it known what dies were copied?
Great post!
If you are talking about the modern copies that Steve Tannebaum was referring to, I have no idea. I only know that Steve told the collector "to knock it off and don't tell anybody how you do it.":
Here are some more Higgins copy dies.
Higgins CWT 9
The "mother die", CWT 10
Higgins CWT 175
The "mother die" , CWT 174
Higgins CWT 165
Mother die CWT 163
Higgins CWT 211
Mother die CWT 210
a good read indeed
Here are some that turned up in the late 1960’s/early 70’s
Turned up how?
Of course it's this type of die work that sells the Indiana Primitives to most collectors. This piece is unusually nice. The normal grade for these pieces is VF, which indicates that many of them circulated for a few years, after the war ended.