NEWMAN PAPERS ON COUNTERFEIT HALFPENCE

 

The Newman Papers on Counterfeit Halfpence

Concluding tomorrow (March 25), Heritage Auctions is presenting Selections from the Eric P. Newman Correspondence Files, an offering of 97 lots of research papers on various topics. Lots 52021-52024 highlight Newman's work on counterfeit halfpence, including the Machin's Mills coinage. Newman had a strong interest in both colonial coinage and counterfeits, and the intersection of the two topics clearly enjoyed much of his attention. Still, the counterfeit halfpence represented Newman's white whale, a subject that greatly interested him but never led to a broad, definitive publication.

As early as 1953, Newman envisioned a comprehensive work on the Machin's Mills coinage, which he noted in correspondence with his brother-in-law Julian Edison on September 21 of that year. On January 4, 1956, Newman wrote to Wayte Raymond that he had visited the Machin's Mills site near Newburgh, NY. A February 9, 1959, letter to Kenneth Rendell further detailed Newman's work on the subject: My work on the Machin's Mills has been continuing for ten years or more. It is the most complex situation I have ever run in to. I have been combing newspapers, records, books, and hundreds of British halfpence for years and I still do not know all the answers. If you read my article in the A.N.S. Centennial publication [1958] on the Vermont matter you will get an inkling of the Machin's Mills complications.

On November 17, 1964, Newman wrote to Howard Kurth The matter of counterfeit halfpence has been a subject to which I have been devoted for twenty years and I think I have enough data to produce something worthwhile which will explode all the theories on Bungtown and other matters of speculation. On January 26, 1973, Newman lamented to Colonial Newsletter editor James C. Spilman: I have all this data assembled and all I need is time to work on it. Included in the present offering, lot 52022, is Newman's unpublished draft, c. 1960, on counterfeit halfpence circulating in colonial America. Newman's most significant published work on the subject appeared in the 1976 American Numismatic Society volume Studies on Money in Early America under the title American Circulation of English and Bungtown Halfpence. Newman's article file for that work appears here as lot 52023.

Image: Initial page, with markup, of Newman's c. 1960 draft, Unauthorized Copper Coins Circulating in America

Link to the Newman Correspondence Files Showcase Auction sale home page:
https://coins.ha.com/c/auction-home.zx?saleNo=63247&ic=breadcrumb-coins-121913-interior

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