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Message:: [QUOTE="cwtokenman, post: 48438, member: 2100"]Hello Rich. As others have said, what you have is known as a Patriotic Civil War token. These were the "generic" tokens issued as opposed to the other general category of Civil War storecards, which had merchant advertising on them. These tokens were greatly needed at their time of issue as most hard coinage throughout the country was being hoarded to the point merchants were having a very difficult time making change for routine transactions. Jody was close, but was a number off on the die identification (die 245 has a period after the date). The Fuld id number for your token is 244/291a. The dies used to produce patriotic cwts were each assigned an identification number. So to identify any of these tokens, the die id numbers are listed for the die pair that was used to produce that token. The 244 is the "Remembrance" die. The "a" is the indicator that the metal used to make the token is copper, Many metals were used to make cwts, although the only other metal known with this die pairing is lead. This token has been assigned a rarity of "R2", which indicates that it is believed that between 2001 to 5000 of that particular token variety still exist. While not a very large quantity, in the token realm that equates to being fairly common. Your token looks to be in pretty good shape, I would guess XF but can not be sure without item in hand. Values from Kanzinger's 2002 book (the most current) are $14 in Fine and Very Fine, $18 in Xtra Fine, and $25 in Uncirculated. Whether the token has been cleaned or not really has very little bearing on the value, especially for the lower valued tokens. Even something as severe as drilling a hole in a cwt may only lower its value 10-15%. Quite a different story as compared to collectable regular coinage.[/QUOTE]

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