NOTES ON THE ALBANY CHURCH PENNY

A most enjoyable issue of The E-Sylum last week. I love seeing the brainy, fun and useful contributions of friends such as Dick Johnson, Kay Freeman and Dennis Tucker (among many others) that appear each week.

Richard Gascoyne of the First Presbyterian Church inquired about the famous Albany Church Penny. I used the same quotation he cited, of his church's resolution authorizing the issue, in my coverage of the penny as Number 37 in Whitman's i>100 Greatest American Medals and Tokens. I found the quotation W. Elliot Woodward's sale of April 28, 1863, Lot 2079. So interest in these pieces is pretty well established!

Walter Breen's Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial Coins is available in many libraries. It devotes a brief chapter to church and communion tokens, and states that their use dates back to the 1635 Liturgy of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. He lists 14 different American issues, and does not include any minted after 1800. Probably the scarcity of small coinage was the main reason for the Albany penny issue. In 1792, according to an online history of the City of Troy, NY, another Presbyterian church issued paper scrip: www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nyrensse/troy.htm .

It is my guess that members of First Presbyterian stopped using their church pennies as soon as Federal cents became available in 1793 or soon afterward.

I found a reference in an 1898 issue of the Ladies' Home Journal exhorting readers to abandon the practice of tithing only a penny. She said, "such an offering is an insult to God and His church, and the sooner people see the matter in this hard, true light, the better."

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see: QUERY: ALBANY CHURCH PENNY INFORMATION SOUGHT (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v15n38a12.html)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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