1863 Civil War Token

In retrospect, having collected CWT's for over fifty years now, I've never seen anyone "net grade" one. Generally, knowledgeable dealers and collectors tend to be conservative when it comes to grading. Unless it's a rare variety, CWT's below VF are more likely to be wallflowers in dealers' cases. The same holds true for damaged tokens.

There are some scarce and even rare varieties of those "Not One Cent" CWT's. (presume yours is copper) Many marked and unmarked replicas surfaced in the 1960's, when the 100th anniversary of the Civil War occurred. Fortunately, these are relatively uncommon in today's market.

Anyone collecting U.S. type coins should really consider adding a few CWT's and HTT's to their set. A buddy of mine is doing just that. After all, these tokens were contemporary forms of nineteenth century currency. Even the Red Book devotes some pages to these issues. Very few coin collectors have any. Yet, values have slowly increased over the years. Twenty years ago, dealers were paying $4 each for commons, whereas $12 is the going buy price nowadays. It'll be interesting to see if collector interest climbs as we move into the sesqui-centennial years.