Expert: Jim Lawniczak - 10/28/2006

Question
Hello Jim. I have found what is the size of a penny and seems to be copper. It has an Indian's head on one side wearing 8 feathers. It also has the #4 stamped on both sides of it. What do you think this is?  Thanks for your time!

Answer
Hello, Andy, I have never about anything about this, but I have a good guess as to what it is likely to be based on experience with other items.  First, the size confuses me -- there are quite a few souvenir items made with larger sized Indian heads (actually about 4 or 5 inches in diameter, much larger than the ize of a U.S. cent.  That piece features a large Indian head and some kind of souvenir language (say, "Souvenir of Washington D.C.").  I do think there are a couple smaller sized pieces but those are much less common than the larger ones.

Anyway, it is certainly not a coin and I can't imagine it is a U.S. mint product.  Thus, it would be classified as a token, and I would think, as described below, as a sample token.

The #4 stamped on each side suggest to me that this would likely be a sample piece.  The businesses that made souvenir and other tokens often printed up sample pieces to show (and often to give) to potential customers.  So if someone wanted to order one of the souvenir pieces, they would show them this one.  It would be listed in a salesman's (or other) catalog as piece #4.  That way the buyer could match it up and then also order by piece number.

So if you were in charge of the chamber of commerce in Detroit, for example, you might see a piece like this and then order 1000 pieces with souvenir of Detroit on it and you would order by specifying item no. 4.

You may want to try going to www.ebay.com and doing a search for something like: "Indian head #4" or "penny #4" or some variations and see if anything like this is selling.  I would doubt it though.  Or you might try similar searches at www.google.com.

Hope this helped a bit, Jim Lawniczak