Oh yeah, a nice civil war token. Many stores had these made for customers to use instead of real coinage. I assume that is due to the lack of coins during the civil war...not sure. Someone correct me please. Also, some folks around here are experts on these tokens and could possibly give you a rarity rating on it. They are a wonderful piece of history and certainly it is neat to find one. Especially if it is from your hometown. I found this one searching through a hoard of cents. I was very happy, since I am from Detroit.
Yeah, there was a shortage of small coins during the war, for whatever reason. They even used postage stamps instead of coins during this time.
The reason was its natural to hoard PM in times of crisis, (look at the prices in the last few years), but once all of the silver and gold was hoarded, people started hoarding cents too. Remember that the small cent at this time was part nickel, so it wasn't just hoarding copper. It was in response to such hoarding that the US took the nickel out of the small cent, since they could see people used plain copper tokens for transactions, so the mint figured they might as well do the same and save some money. So, in effect, this little civil war token forever changed the US cent.
There are about a dozen varieties of your token known Jackie. The picture of the reverse (the Indian head side in this case) isn't clear enough for me to determine which one it is. The general designation number is OH165FT which indicates it's a Cincinnati issue. The rest of the assigned number could range from 2a thru 9a and would indicate the metal the token is struck in. The Smith cards are known struck in copper, brass, zinc, and copper-nickel. All range in rarity scale from R-3 to R-10 so some of them are extremely rare. If you could post a clear picture of both sides, I'll take a shot at attributing it for you. Bruce
Here are the new pictures i promised, if you can try to grade it for rarity that would be awesome, and i plan on selling it sometime, what do you think it may be worth?
<img src="http://www.cointalk.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=187566&stc=1" attachmentid="187566" alt="" id="vbattach_187566" class="previewthumb"><img src="http://www.cointalk.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=187567&stc=1" attachmentid="187567" alt="" id="vbattach_187567" class="previewthumb">Here are the new pictures i promised, if you can try to grade it for rarity that would be awesome, and i plan on selling it sometime, what do you think it may be worth?
There's so much damage on your token that it's difficult to determine the reverse die number, but my best guess is that it's a 1038 die. If that's right it would make the designation number OH165FT-5A and an R-4. Sorry Jackie, but not much value there because of the poor condition and large number of examples known. I'm not 100% it's a 1038 reverse, but that's the best number I can come up with. Bruce