QUERY: MINTMARKS ON U.S.-PRODUCED FOREIGN COINS

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V21 2018 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 21, Number 1, January 7, 2018, Article 12

Robert Rightmire submitted the following question about mintmarks on U.S.-produced foreign coins. -Editor

I'm trying to ascertain why some foreign coins stuck at United States Mints during WWII bear a U.S. Mint mark. Published statements are consistently vague. Examples:

Charles G. Altz & E.H. Barton (Foreign Coins Stuck At United States Mints, Whitman Publishing, 1965, one of the “Black Books") wrote:

Tim Ziebarth (pdxcoinclub.org), Foreign Coins Manufactured at US Mints, March 2006, wrote:

“Each coin made by the U.S. Mint for another country was minted to the specifications dictated by the client country.” (pg.2).

Ziebarth's article is available on the web site of the Willamette Coin Club of Portland, OR. It's worth a read. Here's an excerpt. -Editor

The production of foreign coins by US Mints began in 1833 with the striking of a Liberia (LR) one cent coin. The Liberia one cent, in essence a token dated 1833, was struck by the Mint for the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817 for the sole purpose of transporting “freeborn blacks” and “emancipated slaves” back to Africa.

The U.S. Mint had long been in the business of striking medals for various groups and artists. In fact, the U.S. Mint was the only place to go in North America if you wanted a large sized medal struck, since no other equipment was available that could handle the immense pressures required to strike such pieces. The prospect of the mint manufacturing tokens, as in the case of the Liberian cents, was not a far offshoot from the medal making business. It is believed that the medal manufacturing activities of the mint led to some of the very first foreign coinage struck by the U.S. Mint.

The one-cent token featured “Freed Negro” standing next to a palm tree, with a ship in the distance. Though many regard the one-cent piece a “hard times” token, and thus not acknowledged by the US mint as foreign coinage in its annual reports, it did function as coinage in the Liberian colony

Official and wide-scale minting of Foreign coins began in the US with the passage of the Act of January 29, 1874 which read:

“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That it shall be lawful for coinage to be executed at the mints of the United States, for any foreign countries applying for the same, according to the legally prescribed standards and devices of such country, under such regulations as the Secretary of the Treasury may prescribe; and the charge for the same shall be equal to the expense thereof, including labor, materials, and use of machinery, to be fixed by the Director of the Mint, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury: Provided, That the manufacture of such coin shall not interfere with the required coinage of the United States.”

The first coins struck under this new authorization were 1 and 2 ½ centavo issues in 1875-76 for Venezuela in a Copper-Nickel-Zinc (mintage of 10 and 2 million respectively) at the Philadelphia Mint, and were dated 1876 and 1877.

To read the complete article, see:
Foreign Coins Struck at U.S. Mints (http://pdxcoinclub.org/articles/Foreign%20Coins
%20Struck%20at%20US%20Mints%20CWNA%20article%20with%20table.pdf)

The article references the Whitman Blackbook, the U.S. Treasury publication Domestic and Foreign Coins Manufactured by Mints of the United States 1793-1980 and a 1996 2nd edition of a book by Harry Sheerer titled Mint Manufactured Foreign Coins. I haven't seen either edition of the Scheerer book yet - do any of our readers have one?

A check of the Newman Portal came up empty, but that's a very hard query to frame. While I'm sure there've been some great articles over the years in publications like Coin World and COINage, these are not in the portal. Can anyone point us to an answer to the mint mark question?

Meanwhile, I'd also be curious to learn the documentation behind the claim the the 1833 token was mint-struck. Where did this assertion first appear in the literature? What evidence was cited? In 2012 Eric von Klinger disputed this in a 2012 E-Sylum article. -Editor

The claim is sometimes made that the U.S. Mint struck the 1833 American Colonization Society coppers for Liberia, but this claim is probably in error. Congress first authorized the Mint to accept foreign coinage contracts in an act of 1874.

A search for information on the Liberia token itself did turn up an extensive article by Randy Snyder in the September 2006 issue of Penny-Wise, the official publication of early American Coppers, Inc., but it had nothing to say about who struck the pieces. -Editor

I know we're going down a rabbit hole here, but an article by Jeff Stark in Coin World this week mentions another Africa freed slave piece, the 1791 Sierra Leone 100-cent coin struck by the Soho Mint. -Editor