BYRON WESTON AND CONTEMPORARY COUNTERFEIT HALFPENCE

I started collecting as most coin collectors of today, with Lincoln Cents, when I purchased a partially filled album from a classmate in the 7th grade. I never thought then that I would become as involved in the hobby of Numismatics as I have become today. To make a long story short, and as most collectors do, I eventually specialized into one area. The area that I chose was Colonial and Confederation era coinages; what circulated before we became what is now the United States.

Although I still collect within this subcategory within the larger realm of American coinages I specialized even further into an even smaller category; Contemporary Counterfeit Halfpence. Over the last decade and a half I have authored or co-authored a dozen or more research papers about this largely forgotten and ignored area of numismatics.

One of my first papers that I authored myself took up an entire issue of The Colonial Newsletter, and was only the third single subject issue in the publications history. I’d like to think that all that research and writing had something to do with the increased popularity of counterfeit halfpence. Apparently it has as coins that I purchased for one or two dollars in the early 1990s are now selling in the $200 to $300 range, with scarcer coins selling well into the thousands. Before this they were largely ignored by collectors and numismatics as whole for well over 200 years.

Interestingly, if you were a person living in what is now the United States say, shortly before the revolution, counterfeit halfpence is most likely what you would have had to spend. We were still British then and the Crown did not produce enough small change for use at home let alone within its colonies, and so people simply made their own. Hardly a ship from England arrived with casks labeled “hardware” that actually contained counterfeit halfpence!

Coins have been very good to me – not all that unlike baseball and football has been for the pros, and I’ve come a long way since my humble beginnings. Not only has my research been footnoted in others work, in books, and on websites, but pictures of my coins have been used for illustrations. I’ve also managed to build a premier reference collection of contemporary counterfeit halfpence – before prices skyrocketed – so I guess you could say there was a method to my madness. But I didn’t know or even imagine that ever happening when I was in the 7th grade.

To read the complete article, see: Coin Collecting with Byron Weston (itshr.psu.edu/2014/01/16/january-2014-its-hr-newsletter/)

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