"Jennie by the Seaside": Pictorial love token on 1890 Seated Liberty dime

"Jennie by the Seaside": Pictorial love token on 1890 Seated Liberty dime



Larger obverse picture
Larger reverse picture

Host coin: 1890 USA Seated Liberty dime.
Obverse: original Seated Liberty design, unaltered.
Reverse: "Jennie" in cursive script above ornamental diagonal band, sunburst above, seascape/beach scene with curiously slanted buildings, sailboat, and birds below.

Ex- "ridgecoin1", eBay, 11/03/2015.

This is a nice seascape love token with some whimsically naive yet well-executed engraving. I bought this piece at the same time as I acquired another landscape dime with the name "Charley" on it. "Charley" featured a sunrise scene and had a similar diagonal band in the design, though the two pieces were obviously carved by different artists at different times.

Speaking of which, in my Collectors Universe posting about this coin, an amazing and almost eerie coincidence emerged. Member "abitofthisabitofthat" posted another "Jennie" love token with the very same name and spelling and even the very same design! Which makes one wonder if they weren't once owned by the same Jennie, though the engraving styles differ. (His was more proficiently engraved than mine, though mine above does have a nice folksy style.) Perhaps Jennie lost one and commissioned another artist to engrave the second one as a replacement? Or perhaps this was a "stock design" used by artists at the time (they did that a lot), and the two "Jennie" names were just pure coincidence. This was an intriguing enough mystery that both coins were featured in Tom Delorey's cover article about love tokens in the February, 2016 issue of COINage magazine.

Here is the other Jennie that "abitofthisabitofthat" posted on Collectors Universe. Amazing similarity, eh? Much better done than my piece above, but obviously all the same design elements, same name, same spelling. How cool is that?



The first coin above was part of my Engraved/Counterstamped/Oddball Type Set. I have since sold it, but kept a copy of the magazine in which it appeared.