"Died on the Train": 1878 mourning token engraved on 1858 Seated Liberty half

"Died on the Train": 1878 mourning token engraved on 1858 Seated Liberty half



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Host coin: 1858 USA Seated Liberty half dollar.
Obverse: original Seated Liberty design, unaltered.
Reverse: "July 1st/L. Frank Gray/1878." inscription, with name in Old English lettering, ornamental border around rim.

Ex-"10michaelelps951", eBay, 10/29/2015.

This love token was only my second purchase towards a new love token/engraved/counterstamped type set endeavor. I was (and still am, as of this post) primarily seeking pictorial love tokens, which this is not. However, the engraving style is nice, and I was intrigued by the presence of a full date (month, day, year) and mostly full name, thinking that might make it possible to discover some of the history behind this piece.

I had assumed this was a birth/christening gift, but after finalizing the deal with the seller I did some quick web searching, and discovered that an L. Frank Gray in fact died of consumption (tuberculosis) on that day, while traveling on a train. So unless there is some other intersection of the same name and date in history, it would appear that I fortuitously nailed the history of this piece down. It is a mourning token!

Interestingly, I also found some newspaper obituaries and details on his final resting place online. It doesn't get any better than this. This is one thing that can be amazing about love tokens- you can pin so much more of their history down than you could with a regular coin!

Syracuse Sunday Times, July 7, 1878





The findagrave.com memorial contained a treasure trove of geneaological and historical information, and a picture of Mr. Gray's tombstone.

(It seems the researcher has herself now joined him in the hereafter, so I must posthumously thank her.)

This piece was part of my Engraved/Counterstamped/Oddball Type Set. I sold it in 2016, at a comfortable profit.

~RWS

 

I live for feedback like this. Thank you.

 

Can't have been very fun for his fellow passengers to watch.

Of course such tragedies would've been a little more routine (well, not routine, but more familiar) back then.

We take so much for granted in this day and age...

 

Yes, I know. I sold some really nice stuff out of the exonumia collection in the last year, but I put the proceeds back into my primary ("Eclectic Box of 20") collection.

And I'm doing a "reboot" on the exonumia collection. Now I will focus on holed or mounted love tokens I can wear on my trademark hat (which got stripped of its holey gold coins during my layoff in the recession). It'll be fun to give the hat a new lease on life. I've already acquired several pieces for that project but have not imaged or posted them yet.

 

I got lucky. The information in this case fell into place in less than half an hour of web searching. I am not an exhaustive researcher or scholar by any means. I just know how to do the right keyword searches sometimes.

If you look at the index in my present signature line, you'll see this was not the only time I've gotten lucky and found some interesting and poignant history. Check out the "Pill-Poppin' Sam" story, among others. Or "Relic of a Short Life" and "Bertha's Boy". In those searches, I actually found faces from the past- old photos of the actual people! You wanna talk about "eerily personal"? Try lookin' 'em in the eyes! It's a moving experience.