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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 38388, member: 66&quot;]I can&#039;t give you any specific information about that token, but as for who made them, many were made by button manufacturers and makers of other small metal objects such as badges, medals and pins.&nbsp; One hotbed of token manufacturers was to be found in Cincinnati OH.&nbsp; In some cases the token makers actually had traveling salesmen who would traverse the country visiting merchants and trying to sell thm on the profitable advantage of using tokens to alleviate their small change shortage problems.&nbsp; Merchants would be shown samples of the companies product and they would attempt to sell the merchant custom tokens that advertised his business at a rate of around 80 cents per hundred (Storecard tokens) or generic tokens at 60 cents per hundred (patriotics).&nbsp; The advantage for the merchant being the 20 to 40 difference between he price and the face value.&nbsp; Now that doesn&#039;t sound like a lot of money to us today, but in 1863 it was a significant amount of money.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for the off metal pieces, you may notice that they are almost always much scarcer than the copper tokens.&nbsp; That is because almost all of them were most likely made as &quot;special&quot; pieces for sale to collectors.&nbsp; And many of them were made in the years AFTER the Civil War.&nbsp; The dies were still around and available and they were often used to create mules and off-metal tokens for sale or trade.&nbsp; After all there was no practical purpose to striking silver or overstriking copper-nickel cents as a circulating medium.&nbsp; And white metal pieces probably would not be accepted as cents at the time.&nbsp; (They still wanted SOME intrinsic value.)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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