"Two Bits for an Odd Fellow" : Fraternal lodge token on 1857 Seated Liberty quarter

"Two Bits for an Odd Fellow" : Fraternal lodge token on 1857 Seated Liberty quarter



Larger obverse image
Larger reverse image

Host coin: 1857 Seated Liberty quarter.
Obverse: original Seated Liberty design, unaltered.
Reverse: planed off and re-engraved with a fasces supported by three sets of double columns, all-seeing eye above, Odd Fellows symbol (three conjoined links) below.

Ex-"realap13" (eBay), 07/08/2016.

This is a neat fraternal organization token. While I'm mostly unfamiliar with the "temple" (column and fasces) elements, the triple links below are obviously the symbol of the international Odd Fellows organization and stand for "Amicitia Amor et Veritas" (or "Friendship, Love, and Truth"). I've also seen that all-seeing eye in some of their other iconography. Interestingly, the artist who engraved of the reverse did not choose to orient his engraving in relation to the obverse of the host coin, but chose a seemingly more random rotation- note the hole position.

I like this piece but am not a fan of the somewhat scuzzy obverse toning, so I may later attempt a localized cleaning on that side while leaving the reverse alone. Then I'll need to reimage this later. (Really, it looks a bit better in hand.) But the slightly ugly toning might have actually worked to my advantage a bit, since I won this piece at a pleasantly inexpensive price for a pictorial love token, let alone one on a pre-Civil War quarter host coin with nice details.

This was formerly part of my Engraved/Counterstamped/Oddball Type Set, and will likely be a part of my future reboot of my "Holey Coin Hat" collection.

~RWS

 

I'd say use as a watch fob is highly likely, considering the fraternal associations. However, the hole placement may just have been a random whim of an engraver who ignored the orientation of the obverse altogether. If the engraver was even the person who holed the coin in the first place.

Hole placement is often surprisingly random and asymmetrical/inartistic, which is ironic when you consider the artistic skill of the engravers of that era.

 

Indeed!