I often wonder...
ConstellatioCollector
Posts: 1,909
Who had the forethought to put coins away for a collection? Example: I have some very quality Nova Constellatios (1783/1785)! Why would anybody put these coins away?
Constellatio Collector sevenoften@hotmail.com
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"No Good Deed Goes Unpunished!"
"If it don't make $"
"It don't make cents""
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"No Good Deed Goes Unpunished!"
"If it don't make $"
"It don't make cents""
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I have one,just because I liked it.
C'mon, consider their historical context!
for all those years, especially when I am sure times got tough.
It must have been amazing fortune for one of these coins to avoid commerce all those years.
I doubt highly that many of these coins turned up in grandma's cookie jar. And for the most part the collectors of the 18th and 19th century were probably very wealthy with no need to spend the coins. If anything I would assume that the collectors of that era were a very small group and often traded/sold coins among themselves. If you were a collector and knew that Zebuleon recently passed, you might formally contact his widow and ask to purchase his collection.
Michael
Some ot them are payable in sizable amounts in Pounds Shillings and Pence which was a considerable amount of money back then. A good many new Colonial notes have survived to this day but why weren't they redeemed back then and then destroyed?
Anything making it that far in great shape from those times when one considers the smaller population of people plus the tiny coinage output compared to todays production of coins is something that amazes me. How did so many coins and notes make it this far?
My few guesses are that a good many of these surviving Colonial items trickled their way from one state to another and were held and kept by many as a curiosity from a far away place rather than with intent of forming a collection.
It was not uncommon for a person then to live their entire life and never travel but a few miles from home.
Many of these coins must have looked very foreign or strange and may have been saved because of this.
I also wonder if many of the Latin inscriptions on the Colonial coins were confusing to some. Was a good portion in the Colonies that well versed in Latin?
How many people in the street today would know what Nova Eborac or a Nova Caesarea means?
For fun I would really like to see a survey done on this
With the daily complications of living how many in those days had the luxury of free time or were even wealthy enough in those hard days able to collect coins when one coin could represent the earnings of a couple of days of hard work for many.
Possibly many coins or paper money could have been taken across the ocean and returned many years later.
Some paper money has been found between the pages of old books possibly placed there then forgotten.
Well at any rate thanks to those by whatever means intentional or not that managed to leave us some nice historic keepsakes.
<< <i>Who had the forethought to put coins away for a collection? Example: I have some very quality Nova Constellatios (1783/1785)! Why would anybody put these coins away? >>
I believe that most of the surviving examples were not saved by prescient coin collectors, but rather by the coiners themselves, who almost certainly would have set aside some high quality initial strikes as advertisements of their capabilities, approval samples to negotiate new coinage contracts, souvenirs to give to various dignitaries, local politicians, financial backers of the project, etc. One could also imagine that the people making the coins held onto a few nice examples for themselves just for fun.
In the recent sale of the James Watt Collection (Morton and Eden November 2002) some amazingly high grade early English coins (including a Copper Company of Canada Token considered part of the US colonial series) were sold and were, evidently, saved by the original Mr. Watt who struck them in the late 18th century and which had been kept in the Watt family, in tact, since that time. So in that case, it was the coiner who 'collected' them.