#181-CIVIL WAR SALE: VERY POORLY STRUCK BUT INTERESTING CIVIL WAR TOKEN

This is a very unusual Civil War token for a couple of reasons: The image of a friar is unlike any other CWT and the very poor strike is indicative of a well-worn and almost useless pair of obverse and reverse dies.

One would expect to see something other than the large individual on the obverse of this token and there could well have been some words around the outside of the CWT. But looking at the reverse only reinforces the observation that the CWT was so poorly struck that hardly any of it exists.

Since I've not previously seen this token, I can't intelligently comment on how much if any of the lack of detail is from circulation. I seriously doubt that any of this has come from excessive circulation. The dies may have been filled AND in very bad shape when the CWT was struck. And as noted, the strike was clearly very weak to begin with. And a poor die and poor strike combine to result in this smooth and virtualy unreadable CWT. Further, there is a decent and fairly strong rim on the obverse and just the opposite on the reverse, again I assume due to strike & die issues.

SOME BACKGROUND ON THE LARGE NUMBER OF CWT "ERRORS"
Despite all this--or because of it!--I decided to purchase this along with other CWT's you will find in this sale. I find it quite interesting and depending on how one collects CWT's, this token could be a very nice addition to a collection. There are plenty of opportunities to collect "error" CWT's, primarily from poor planchets and/or strike and die issues. I'm sure many Civil War and token collectors are very familiar with the typically very large number of poor strikes and poor dies on Broas Brothers CWT's for example. And die cuds can be found on many other CWT's, also. Virtually all such issues are due to overuse of the dies. Private businesses issuing storecards wanted to get as many tokens as possible from the dies because there was little to no chance they would pay to have another die made.

U.S. copper was not available due to the need for the war effort, so one could not expect that it was easy for any CWT's to be problem free. That the the number struck as storecards was a tiny fraction of what would've been struck if produced by the U.S. Mint meant that one does find many issues where die life was short and problems were avoided by the very low number struck. And the opposite is very true, as well.

At one point many years ago the historian in me took over from the seller, and I undertook some research into Broas' many different designs on CWT's. I was able to assemble a research collection of 50+, each demonstrating a different issue. All Broas tokens have more CWT's with issues than not!

The Broas' bakery certainly was not one of the largest business' in the North, yet the company was more prolific in producing storecards advertising their business than most who chose to strike them. I'm not sure why the company chose to strike so many different tokens...and then chose to produce so many oncne the useful life of dies has been passed. Unfortunately, I considered my Broas research to NOT be complete. In hindsight, it probably would've been helpful to collectors had I had the time to publish an exhaustive research paper devoted to Broas and there many, many different dies.

And this "friar" CWT is another CWT worthy of studying--and then adding it to one's collection.