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Byron Hot Springs Hotel Token - California Resort and World War II POW Camp
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<p>[QUOTE="lordmarcovan, post: 2921329, member: 10461"]Yes, the seemingly odd 12-1/2 cents and 6-1/4 cents denominations are holdovers from the old Spanish Milled Dollars of the colonial era, upon which our Founding Fathers based the US dollar. The Spanish dollar circulated in America up until the Civil War, being legal tender until 1857.</p><p><br /></p><p>But while the US dollar has always been a decimal currency, the old Spanish dollars were divided into eighths (8 "bits", so called, because people would often literally <a href="http://www.bettyandruss.com/SMD.htm" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.bettyandruss.com/SMD.htm" rel="nofollow">cut the big dollar coins up into little pie-piece-shaped bits</a> to make small change when smaller denominations were unavailable).</p><p><br /></p><p>This is how the later US quarter-dollar coins came to be nicknamed "two bits", a nickname which hung on long after Spanish Milled Dollars had ceased circulating.</p><p><br /></p><p>Before the Civil War, it was common to still see Spanish dollars and their fractions in circulation alongside the US Mint's products, so people often did the math in eighths. And even into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some tokens still kept up the practice, which is how we ended up with those odd denominations.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="lordmarcovan, post: 2921329, member: 10461"]Yes, the seemingly odd 12-1/2 cents and 6-1/4 cents denominations are holdovers from the old Spanish Milled Dollars of the colonial era, upon which our Founding Fathers based the US dollar. The Spanish dollar circulated in America up until the Civil War, being legal tender until 1857. But while the US dollar has always been a decimal currency, the old Spanish dollars were divided into eighths (8 "bits", so called, because people would often literally [URL='http://www.bettyandruss.com/SMD.htm']cut the big dollar coins up into little pie-piece-shaped bits[/URL] to make small change when smaller denominations were unavailable). This is how the later US quarter-dollar coins came to be nicknamed "two bits", a nickname which hung on long after Spanish Milled Dollars had ceased circulating. Before the Civil War, it was common to still see Spanish dollars and their fractions in circulation alongside the US Mint's products, so people often did the math in eighths. And even into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some tokens still kept up the practice, which is how we ended up with those odd denominations.[/QUOTE]
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