Was Told This Is A Military Trade Coin From Upper Canada Or A Copy Of One

This is Bust and Harp token, a series that saw widespread circulation around Lower Canada in the 1830s. These were imitations of an original design that was imported from Great Britain circa 1825, and vastly outnumber the originals. A hoard of these guys was found in the St. Lawrence river in the summer of 1984, and yours has the characteristic look. When you say it came out of the St. Lawrence river, did you happen to find this yourself?

Your variety is Courteau 17 (LC-60-17) which is one of the common varieties from the hoard, and a common variety in general. Still, a very interesting piece!

Yep! There were apparently a few thousand examples in the hoard, all of them pretty much uncirculated. The location of the hoard seems to be unclear and two locations are usually proposed: the Thousand Islands near Prescott Ontario, and the Rivière des Mille Îles in Quebec. There seems to be confusion with what "Thousand Islands" locale the hoard came from.

Here are some of my own examples:

Co 17 Bust and Harp, the same as yours


Co 3 Bust and Harp


Co 1 Tiffin


Co 2 Tiffin


The Tiffin tokens also accompanied the Bust and Harp tokens in the hoard, which indicates a common manufacturer for the imitation varieties in the two series. This result doesn't seem to be widely known, but it's pretty interesting as it suggests that there was a massive counterfeiting operation in Lower Canada(?) of which nearly nothing is known about!

I'm going to fess up here, as I did many years ago on the old CCRS site. I have been an avid collector of foreign coin for 40 years, and started to specialize in Victoria Canadian around 1985. A friend of mine and I used to order bundles of coins called "Premium Junk" from Jeff Zarit down in Dallas (I lived in the US up until I moved here, upon retirement in 1997). His premium junk could be purchased as poundage (expensive for us at the time) or 13 for $20. Zarit had a huge inventory and mailing lists with pamphlets coming out every month or so. His premium junk would be nice collectable coins that weren't worth the time for him to look up to see what they were or what they would be worth, so he just pushed it aside. There was almost NO 20th century coinage, except for silver, and most was 18th/19th century with some 1600's frequently.

We used to find lots of $50-100 coins in the lots, with always most in the $10-20 book range. We always got lots of older Canadian coins/tokens and lots of German or Italian/Austrian States. It would take us weeks to figure out what we had between our Krause's and specialized references. After few years of that, with we two splitting every month or two what we had gotten, I was transferred and the premium junk stopped. I moved to New Hampshire and was able to really dive deep into 19th century Canadian coinage. I still had boxes and albums of the old premium junk that I hadn't fully investigated and some of those, (maybe 8-10) copper blacksmith tokens , some just like the Tiffins and Bust/Harp in this thread. I was able to look up almost all of the "normal" bronze tokens, so most were taken care of. I pulled out the tokens I could find in my reference books and tossed away the 3-4 brass tiffins like yours, thinking that they were modern copies of old coins. I remember tossing them and thought at the time that I hoped this act would not come back and bite me. However, when I see threads like this featuring coins or similar coins that I have tossed in years gone by, I fell like the rookie doofus concerning collecting. Now I HAVE grown up to be somewhat of an expert on Victoria large cent varieties, but copper, barely readable Tiffin tokens are thorns in my heel.

I was told they were dumped by the authorities to remove them from circulation not as a stash . I love these old stories eh , when you hear multiple accounts from different angles it legitimizes the story.

okiecoiner, that's a great story! My collecting interests occupy the other end of the spectrum as I feel much more at home with colonial tokens and crude contemporary counterfeits, whereas in identifying varieties of Victorian Large Cents I am pretty hopeless (but aiming to improve!)

TerryT, those are some nice examples, and the Courteau 15 you have is the hardest to come across of the Bust & Harp varieties in the hoard. That its origin was in the Assomption River was what I had come across most commonly, until items from the hoard owned by Donald Partrick, evidently in their original envelopes from Warren Baker, turned up and were inscribed "Prescott Hoard". A location near the Thousand Islands... This has, understandably, caused some confusion!

Also, love the write up M_d_in_guy