Just finished reading this week’s edition and wanted to tell you I particularly enjoyed the article about the detectorist finding the Victoria Cross on the banks of the river Thames. The volume and scope of what you are able to gather and publish each week continues to truly amaze me.

The Pennsylvania Slate Company Note said that it would pay 1% interest on 20 May 1838. Thus it became worth 10.1 cents. It did not promise any additional value after the redemption date. Thus, the most it was ever worth was 10.1 cents.

Ten cents earning simple interest would earn 17.9 cents in 179 years.

I asked my computer to figure compound interest on 10 cents principal and 1% annual interest compounded over 179 years. I got an answer of 59 cents representing the initial investment of 10 cents and earnings of 49 cents. This is only approximately correct.

The full computation should run out to 357 decimal places. I don't know how my computer rounds and truncates in making the computation. This is complicated because my computer probably converts to binary, computes and then converts back to decimal.

I am just getting through all the E-Sylums that piled up while I was in the UK for a month. I wanted to mention that Burdette's guess of "Denarium Church Penny" seems off to me -- that's basically calling it Penny Church Penny, which is pretty redundant, and a waste of an initial, really. With initials the obvious choice is that they are the initials of first, middle and last name of someone, and with this kind of a decorated border around the counterstamp, perhaps a punch for silver/goldsmith, a pewter maker or something like that. I think that would be the first place to look, and there are books out there that detail those marks -- luckily since all the host coins known so far are colonials we probably don't have to wade through the thousands of British silver and pewter makers and instead just concentrate on North America.

The C.P. initials DO work so well with Church Penny though that I wouldn't ignore that avenue of research either -- but I would suggest that in this case the D before it would most likely be an initial for the name of the church or the town/district it was located in, so something like Dover Church Penny; there would be no need to spell it all out since it would only have been used in the very limited area of the church itself and people would know what the D stood for.

The small B could be an initial of the person who cut the punch or perhaps of the church official who ordered these to be struck. Lots of speculation, and hopefully someone out there can find some facts. If it can be tied to an actual congregation then Syd Martin's example will prove to be the bargain of the auction season as these would rightfully be valued at the same levels as the Albany church pennies (and probably even more in demand from American collectors because the host coins are colonials!)

Below are the links for Jason's Coin Contest #3 Giveaway and the results of the Coin Contest #2. Thank you for including our contest in The E-Sylum.

Over the years a well-known city in this state was home to many well-known numismatists with such surnames as Cohen, Berg, Garrett, Stablein, Duffield, Fuld, Eliasberg, and Newcomer.