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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Beefer518, post: 2987005, member: 87737&quot;]This is a great thread.</p><p><br /></p><p>Ok, two more unusual circulated coins. This time they&#039;re colonials, and they&#039;re both Connecticuts. And like the Henning Nickel above, they are counterfeits! Yup, a cent was worth enough back in the late 1700&#039;s to justify making counterfeits that didn&#039;t have (at the time) a numismatic premium. As you can tell by the wear, they were accepted as genuine by the general public, and used regularly for trade.</p><p><br /></p><p>Quite a number of CT coppers were counterfeits, and I think all, or almost all of them can be attributed to 3 counterfeiters; Walter Mould of Morristown, NJ, John Bailey of NYC, and Benjamin Buell (Machin&#039;s Mills) of Newburgh, NY.</p><p><br /></p><p>Walter Mould was a legal minter (producer?) of New Jersey coppers, but I guess he decided he could fatten his wallet a bit by minting lightweight CT coppers. The &quot;Muttonhead&quot; variety below is attributed to Mr Mould.</p><p><br /></p><p>John Bailey had done some subcontracting work for Mould on the NJ coppers (the &quot;Running Fox&quot; variety is his), and I guess he learned a few other things from Mould (pure speculation on my part). The &quot;Horned Bust&quot; variety is attributed to Mr Bailey.</p><p><br /></p><p>Machin&#039; Mills was a legitimate coin mint, and is believed to be responsible for all of the 1788 CT coppers, as well as some other counterfeited coins (British Halfpence, Vermont coppers), and was also a mint for the Fugio. I don&#039;t have any samples of Machin&#039;s Mills counterfeit CT coppers.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think it&#039;s interesting that these counterfeit coins were readily accepted back then. My guess is that as the country&#039;s monetary system was in it&#039;s infancy, and there was little means to educate the public as to what is genuine, folks would just accept them thinking that worse case, they have some copper. And since there was so little of it out there, with many different varieties, it would be difficult to know right off what was the real stuff and what wasn&#039;t.</p><p><br /></p><p>1787 Connecticut &quot;Muttonhead&quot; (brought to you illegally by Walter Mould)</p><p>[ATTACH=full]736032[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>1787 Connecticut &quot;Horned Bust&quot; (John Bailey)</p><p>[ATTACH=full]736038[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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