THE COLONIAL NEWSLETTER AUGUST 2017

Issue 164 of the Colonial Newsletter will be delivered to subscribers in August. This issue is very large and contains the first half of the 1787 Connecticut Mint transcripts – this document is actually Mark Leavenworth’s daily ledger book.

Randy Clark and I, along with teams of assistants, have transcribed all of the entries for 1787, which is the period when Mark Leavenworth maintained an ownership interest in the Connecticut mint. The ledger reveals, among other interesting discoveries, that blanks for Connecticut coppers were processed at a mill in Hamden, Connecticut, and transported the short distance to Leavenworth’s store in New Haven where they were struck on a press at his shop.

There were, in my opinion, multiple presses in New Haven striking Connecticut coppers in 1787, with at least one other press located at Abel Buell’s shop. This transcript, along with the transcript of the 1788 records, is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Connecticut mint. We will be publishing the rest of the 1787 records in Issue 165 of CNL.

The current issue also contains a lengthy article outlining the discovery of Arabic coins in New England that circulated in Colonial America for a brief period. The author has detailed a number of finds of these coins and presents his theory on how they arrived in the American colonies in the 1690s.

The final article is a short piece by me on Jack Arabas, who was an employee of the Connecticut mint. Jack, who was born into slavery, is one of history’s unsung heroes as he is responsible for delivering hundreds of men from bondage. This article details what is known of Jack’s life and his interaction with the owners of the mint and is the second article I have published this year recounting the stories of African-Americans, both free and slave, who worked at the Connecticut mint.

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web