Baden 1857 1 Kreuzer Possible Plating

PMCoin, I've encountered plated coins of all sorts - not just commemoratives. Sometimes they're also holed for use in jewelry or some other adornment, other times not. Who knows why?

A very cheap way of making a "commemorative medal", especially for a royal event, is to take an ordinary circulating coin and turn it into a medal. This might involve things like plating it, drilling a hole in it for attaching a loop, or even grinding down one side of the coin and engraving some other suitable message on the ground-down side. This "value-added" coin could then be sold as souvenirs of the royal occasion, for considerably more than the face value of the coin.

It's kind of like a 19th century equivalent of those coin-telemarketers who take normal coins like US State Quarters, paint or plate them, and sell them on for high premiums.

The legality of someone doing this would be another question. Many countries (especially monarchies) historically have had laws against deliberately vandalizing or damaging coins. Many other countries have laws against taking a base-metal coin and painting or plating it to make it look silver or gold, as that's a sneaky way to make a cheap but authentic-looking counterfeit coin. In this case, given the commemorative nature of the coins in question, we can probably rule out an attempt to counterfeit, but the law of the land may not have seen the matter the same way at the time. I'm not familiar with what the laws of Baden would have been at the time.