1788 New Jersey copper. Maris 65-u. Rarity-4. Horses Head Right. VF-30 (PCGS).148.7 grains. A high quality example of this elusive variety, with the added attraction of a mysterious provenance. Nice chocolate brown fields contrast melodiously with even lighter brown design elements. Finely granular but very attractive, perfectly centered on the obverse with a complete ring of denticles around the periphery. The reverse is aligned to the upper left, and the die edge is visible at the lower right. The reverse is rotated a few degrees clockwise of proper coin turn. The strike is full and even, a very unusual characteristic for this variety, whose planchets and strikes usually try to outdo each other for incompetence. A couple of minor hairlines cross from O of NOVA to the base of the horsehead device, but no other significant flaws are seen.<p>In the right obverse field, 65 is carefully painted atop a lower case u in white ink. There appear to be no less than four different hands who painted Maris die variety attributions on New Jerseys, and we’d be lying if we claimed to know exactly who painted this one. All used white or off white ink and all painted their attributions in the same place, the upper right obverse field. These painted die variety markings (also known as PDVs) are often associated with William Wallace Hays, whose collection was sold at fixed price in October 1903 by dealer Charles Steigerwalt to Dr. Thomas Hall, whose coppers eventually ended up in the Virgil Brand Collection. Hays typically used a fraction bar to divide the obverse and reverse attributions on his Connecticut coppers; it’s likely that the New Jerseys using this format are the ones from his collection (for instance, the Maris 67-v from our May 2007 sale, lot 482). Meanwhile, the Maris 65-u from our sale of the Scherff Collection (March 2010) shows an entirely different handwriting, with a differently formed 6 and a lower-case cursive u. But the Maris 6-C in our January 2007 Americana sale shows a 6 that matches nicely to this one and may have been done by the same hand. Are these all Hays coins? It’s unlikely. Instead, multiple state copper enthusiasts active in the last quarter of the 19th century probably used this system to identify their coppers by die variety — they may be known to us, they may not be, and we may never figure out whose is whose. Some of the painted die variety New Jerseys seen actually show Crosby identifications, and thus likely predate the 1881 Maris text (see Ray Williams in the Winter 2007 <em>C4 Newsletter</em>).<p>The SHI Condition Census for this variety included an unverified AU from the Anton Collection in the first position, the Maris-Garrett-Taylor coin as EF, the Spiro-Frontenac-Menchell piece as EF-, and four VF+ coins in positions four through seven. This piece may be more worn than all of them, but it deserves Condition Census consideration for its very distinctive relative perfection.From the E Pluribus Unum Collection of New Jersey Coppers.
