Coin/Token From Battle Ground, Ind.need Help Identifying. (Id: Customized Tourist Token)

Hopefully this works...if not, I will try again

definetely not a coin. A commemorative medal maybe?

The regular spacing of the letters and punctuation make me wonder if it's a version of those "mint-your-own" medal-charms, where you can stamp your own legend onto the coin. They often have machines to make these items at touristy-type places.

The back should have the outer ring dimpled by the die-strike of each individual letter.

If this guess is correct, then no amount of searching for a "Ruth Cowgill" medal will come up with anything, because this piece would be unique - it would have been made by a lady named Ruth Cowgill at the time of her visit to that town, probably sometime just before or shortly after the 1904 presidential election.

Perhaps collectors of US election material might have more information on these medals. Or, try searching the Internet for medals with the same central motif.

Let me show you what I mean.

Here's a medallion produced by the mechanism I'm talking about:



I made it myself, at the main railway station in Toronto (Canada) while the family waited to catch a train there in 1983. It, too, is made of aluminium. The side with the text on it would have originally looked the same as the other side, only without the slight rippling.

The machine to produce these things resembled a cross between a one-armed-bandit and an old-style "dymo" labeller. You put in a quarter or two to start the process, and a blank medal was fed into the machine. I think I even got to select the central crown, from a half-dozen possible options.

There was a big dial on the front, which you turned until the letter you wanted was selected. You then pulled the lever, which punched that letter onto the medal. Then the coin was rotated slightly, so the next letter could be stamped. The holes in my medal (and presumably the hole in yours) would have been used to lock the medal in pace as it turned. This process was repeated, one letter at a time, until all the possible slots were filled, at which time the finished medal was ejected.

I know these machines have been around for over a hundred years (I have seen an example produced on a machine here, in Australia, which looked very similar to mine, dating from the late 1890's or early 1900's), so it's entirely possible your medal was produced on such a machine.

The thing that persuades me most of all about this being how your medal was made, is the straight line at the beginning of the text, right of the R in Ruth. That's exactly what a "blank" space looks like on a medal made like this. Radial lines also occur all the way around, evenly spaced between the letters, just like you can see on mine. You can see it best between the period and the B in Battle; I suspect that either the period die was slightly worn, or the lever wasn't pulled down quite as hard there.

That makes a lot of sense too in that Battle Ground, Indiana was the site of the Battle at Tippecanoe (sorry for spelling)...so a machine like that would makes sense since it was a historical site...I wonder if it is truelly from 1904, or if it is from a later year, but that was the year from the design...