Civil War Sesquicentennial relic token idea

The Civil War Sesquicentennial has effectively passed into history. (I believe one Confederate ship was still active in early August of 1865, but not for much longer.) It was little noted and few seemed to care about it. How many people would really care about a relic token/medal to commemorate the event? I wonder ...

This is an idea whose time has seldom come. I think that most collectors feel the way I do. An item that was made yesterday is of little interest, even if it is made of metal that was used for something else during the war. For example there were gold ingots that recovered from the
SS Central America. Some dealers tried to sell them, but many of them contained large amounts of gold and therefore had very high prices. Sales were slow, so somebody got the idea of melting them down and making them into replicas of the old time $50 gold pieces. I see these pieces at the shows in certification holders, but I don't think that they are good sellers.

The case you cite here is something else. In the early 1900s iron from the CSS Virginia (a.k.a. Merrimac) was recovered from the place where the Confederates blew up the ship in 1862. The Confederate idea was to keep the North from capturing the ship. The recovered metal was a relic, but it was not very appealing. It was just a lot of twisted, rusted iron. It was turned into items like this miniture horseshoe and more importantly some tokens, which were once thought to be from the Civil War era. Even though we now know that the tokens were made circa 1906, they still sell for as much as $3,500 in the top conditions.

These items are an exception, and they now bring this kind of money a century after they were made.

The short answer is, I don't think that this is a good idea financially.

BTW I do have an example of this miniture horseshoe on a better preserved card, and the "poorest known" example of the CSS Virginia token. I would like to have a better example of the token, but have not run into a suitable replacement.

The horseshoes alone can go for 100/500 and you want to destroy a real piece of history to make modern JUNK?

<< <i>The horseshoes alone can go for 100/500 and you want to destroy a real piece of history to make modern JUNK? >>



I misinterpreted his message at first also. He is not proposing to melt the horseshoe. He is providing it as an example of a piece that was made from relic materials.