Whh 1840-56 Token, Cast Fake

It is a souvenir item, from some location that has a tie in with him. They generally aren't finished as well as the originals.

Don't know if many of the people know about that law outside the hobby. And if it was contracted for being made outside the country The people there wouldn't know and probably not care.
I really can't see any body making these in any quantity as there isn't a large following and I would thing that the more that hit the market the lower the price would fall. But stranger things have happened.

It might be made as a souvenir piece back close to the time, he was know.

This is probably a second copy, sold in 2008...





There's not enough detail in the crummy auction photos, but

1) The hole, looking identical, is a clue because they were not carefully drilled or punched on genuine tokens - anywhere between 11:00 and 1:00, close to or far from the rim, and in different sizes. It's obvious on the first example that the hole was part of the casting. There would've been a hole in the original, so cast copies would all be the same.

2) The color - these were brass tokens, and we know the first one is a fake.

3) Poor details despite some features that indicate little genuine wear. The fields have that same rough cast appearance too, unlike the well crafted originals.

4) Indications at the bottom of the second example where the sprue was removed.

Incidentally, there were vintage William Henry Harrison tokens made perhaps in the 1860's, not really sure of the date, back-dated to this era (plus some larger undated medals) but they were from new dies and well struck, not cast, not intended as counterfeits.

-Duncan

This makes me want to post pictures of my WHH. Now I question if it's a fake. So, these were minted between 1840-56?

I hope I didn't mislead anybody by calling the last images "supposed genuine"; it was just a good pair of pictures from my files, typical of genuine WHH 1840-56 tokens among my records. Comparing that one to the cast fakes makes it easy to see the flaws in the cast fakes.

Satxwd, WHH 1840-56 is the DeWitt catalog number for the particular variety, although the "1840" is an indication of the date it was released, for the 1840 political campaign era, and usually that date is found on the tokens (some were optimistically dated 1841 instead, in anticipation of his inauguration date!). In the same way, tokens for Andrew Jackson's campaigns are catalogued as AJ 1824-xx and AJ 1828-xx.

I purposely chose to collect Hard Times tokens because there were very few known fakes, and the few common fakes were well documented. A couple fakes are listed in the Rulau catalog, not because they are of any particular value, but rather mostly because they are common enough that collectors need to be able to identify them.

The political campaign tokens of the Hard Times era are just a sub set of the tokens from that time period from roughly 1828-1846, depending on how strict one chooses to be when defining what to collect.

What has happened, though, is that ebay a few years ago added a listing category for these, when previously they were lumped under "other". There seems to be quite a bit more activity now that they can be found under their own "Hard Times" heading.

I'll try to pull together some examples of the known fakes in another thread; I picked up a few examples when they were cheap. Most are offered as genuine, of course, but even the common ones that catalog for $2 to $5 often sell now for $20 or more.

The whole field of Hard Times tokens, including the political tokens, has done quite well value-wise in recent years, despite a funky economy.

-Duncan

Oh no. There are AJ 1824 fakes, too? I had no idea. I just bought an AJ token. When I get it in the mail I'll post pictures. This takes the fun out of my collection. One of the reasons I started collecting HTT and campaign tokens was because I thought they were rare with little to no fakes. Well, that and the fact that I love History.

Oh, no, satxwd, I'm not saying there are AJACK fakes - I was just giving another example of how the DeWitt/Sullivan numbering system works!

I'd love to see your tokens from that era, can you post them here?

And colonialjohn, I'll track down scans of my Hard Times tokens marked "T" or "TRUE" or "TRUE/ALB" or "TROY".

-Duncan

These 1960's era replicas, all dated 1824 instead of 1834, are constantly showing up on ebay. Oftentimes, there will be an "R" counterstamped on the reverse. Here's one that's currently listed:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1824-Anti-U...em3cdc4cdb87