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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 1736892, member: 66&quot;]Harper was trying to win a coining contract.&nbsp; He produced his own dies and planchets and demonstrated his coining ability to a committee of government officials in the basement of his sawmill. (Same basement where the 1792 half dismes were coined.)&nbsp; The coins struck were distributed to the committee.&nbsp; Harper did not get a contract and later when they realized that it probably wasn&#039;t a good idea to leave the dies with Harper they were recovered and Harper was reimbursed $100 for his expenses.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Jefferson heads were known at least as early as 1869.&nbsp; They may have been known earlier than that but 1869 was when they got the name Jefferson Heads.&nbsp; Frank Stewart discussed Harpers bid for a coinage contract in 1924.&nbsp; Breen decided in 1952 that the Jefferson heads were the pieces that Harper struck for the committee.&nbsp; This was probably just speculation on Breen&#039;s part because as far as I know there is no definitive proof linking the Jefferson heads to Harper.&nbsp; There is no official description of what he struck other than &quot;cents&quot;.</p><p><br /></p><p>Personally I believe the Jefferson heads are simply contemporary counterfeits.&nbsp; There are just some things that don&#039;t make sense if this was a presentation to impress a government committee.&nbsp; The engraving is crude compared to the official cents, hardly something to convince the committee that you can do better than the mint.&nbsp; Secondly, for a simple demonstration why are there so many variations?&nbsp; There is only one obv die but two different reverses, two different planchet thicknesses, plain edge and two different sets of lettered edge dies.&nbsp; There are less than 75 Jefferson Head cents out there, but there are five different varieties!&nbsp; It would seem to me that if you are trying to show how you can do a better job than the mint, you would want to rapidly strike a large number of the same coin, not just a few with a lot of changes.&nbsp; That sounds to me like someone who makes up a few cents when he needs them and in small batches. (A cent was a significant amount of money then.)</p><p><br /></p><p>As for the bust it was not intended to be anyone in particular, just a poor copy of the head on the current cent.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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