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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Jimski, post: 2900026, member: 77373&quot;]1787 Fugio copper, Newman 9-P, R4 very scarce</p><p><br /></p><p>The first coins authorized by the United States.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]698365[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]698366[/ATTACH] </p><p>Struck at a private mint. The business deal did not go well.&nbsp; Possible motivation for the United States establishing its own mint 5 years later.</p><p><br /></p><p>From <u>The Coins of Colonial and Early America</u>, Louis Jordan, University of Notre Dame, Department of Special Collections. <a href="https://coins.nd.edu/ColCoin/ColCoinIntros/Fugio.intro.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://coins.nd.edu/ColCoin/ColCoinIntros/Fugio.intro.html" rel="nofollow">https://coins.nd.edu/ColCoin/ColCoinIntros/Fugio.intro.html</a></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Rival petitions to produce the coppers were received from Matthias Ogden of New Jersey and James Jarvis, who had purchased controlling interest in the Connecticut enterprise</i> {franchise}<i>, The Company for Coining Coppers. The contract was awarded to Jarvis …&nbsp; Jarvis was required to produce some three hundred tons of Fugio cents. He was able to obtain about thirty tons of copper from the government to begin coining with the proviso he would pay the government for the copper through his coining operation. Jarvis had Abel Buell make the Fugio dies. He then put his father-in-law, Samuel Broome, in charge of the minting operations and went to Europe in search of copper and assistance. Jarvis sought the assistance of Matthew Boulton, owner of the Soho Mint in Birmingham, and others, but without cash up front, Jarvis was unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Broome used much of the federal copper to mint about three and a half million 1787 Connecticut coppers, which were lighter in weight and thus more profitable than the Fugio&#039;s. In the end Broome made only about 400,000 Fugio cents (about four tons out of the 300 tons of coppers they had been contracted to produce) which were sent to the U.S. Treasury on May 21, 1788. That so few coins had been minted and that those coins were slightly underweight concerned the Congress, but that no payment had been made on the thirty tons of copper the federal government had delivered to Jarvis led the Congress to void his contract on September 16, 1788. This was followed by a congressional report on September 30, 1788 stating Jarvis had received a large quantity of federal copper but had only paid for a small portion and that &quot;the Board of Treasury will take effectual measures to recover [the remainder] as soon as possible.&quot;</i></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Thomas Machin then bought Jarvis&#039;s equipment, and Broome joined Jarvis in Europe. The diemaker Abel Buell gave his equipment to his son Benjamin and also fled the country.</i>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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