I found this a few days back while metal detecting. Any info you can give me on this would be appreciated. It looks like it was silver plated at one time. Were these type of coins faked a lot back in the day? As far as the date goes, I can make out an 8 and a 4 next to it. So I'm thinking 1840s? The thing is huge. Thanks, Jim
You have pretty much solved the mystery. It looks like a contempoary counterfeit that was silver plated copper. Have you had it tested to make sure it's not just toned silver? These were commonly counterfeited in the day.
In the 1840's there were a lot of counterfeit 8 reales in circulation in the south and west. The refiner of the New Orleans mint even wrote a monograph on varieties of counterfeit 8 reales in common circulation in the New Orleans area around 1845. A monograph of the silver dollar, good and bad: illustrated with facsimile figures of four hundred and twenty-five varieties of dollars, and eighty-seven varieties of half dollars, including the genuine, the low standard, and the counterfeit : giving their weight, quality and exact value, and enabling the inexperienced to detect those which are spurious As you can seee from the title there were a LOT of varieties even back then and there have been another hundred years of counterfeits since then. (Although there were probably more back then when they were an actual circulation coin.) Original copies of the momagragh are very scarce and costly today, but it is available as a "Print on demand" for about $20. I have seen one though so I can't judge the quality of the reproduction.
In the 1840's there were a lot of counterfeit 8 reales in circulation in the south and west. The refiner of the New Orleans mint even wrote a monograph on varieties of counterfeit 8 reales in common circulation in the New Orleans area around 1845. A monograph of the silver dollar, good and bad: illustrated with facsimile figures of four hundred and twenty-five varieties of dollars, and eighty-seven varieties of half dollars, including the genuine, the low standard, and the counterfeit : giving their weight, quality and exact value, and enabling the inexperienced to detect those which are spurious by John L Riddell As you can see from the title there were a LOT of varieties even back then and there have been another hundred years of counterfeits since then. (Although there were probably more back then when they were an actual circulation coin.) Original copies of the monagragh are very scarce and costly today, but it is available as a "Print on demand" for about $20. I have seen one though so I can't judge the quality of the reproduction.
