Tokens & Medals

Colorado

This site is published in Pueblo, and Colorado gets the attention a home state deserves. Private gold in 1860, a private silver dollar in 1900, company scrip in the coal camps, a working private mint today, and the national association's museum an hour up the road.

Victor, 1900–1901

Lesher Referendum dollars

Octagonal silver, a mine owner's answer to Bryan's defeat. Every variety with its HK and Zerbe number, the mintage argument, and what the Secret Service took.

 Pueblo

Pueblo tokens and scrip

Colorado Supply Company scrip from the CF&I camps, saloon and cigar-store trade tokens, the Mineral Palace medal, streetcar fares, and where to research an issuer.

Private gold, 1860 to 1861

Before there was a Denver Mint there was Clark, Gruber & Co., three bankers from Leavenworth, Kansas, who opened a private mint at 16th and Market in Denver in July 1860 and struck $2.50, $5, $10 and $20 gold pieces from Pike's Peak dust. The 1860 tens and twenties carry a stylized mountain that nobody who has seen Pikes Peak would recognize; the smaller 1860 pieces and all of 1861 use a Liberty head with the firm's name on the tiara. The 1860 coins were unalloyed and soft, the 1861 coins alloyed, and a Philadelphia Mint assay found them full value or a little over. The firm coined $594,305 before it stopped striking in 1862. Congress bought the plant for $25,000, took possession in April 1863, and ran it as an assay office; Denver did not strike a federal coin until 1906. The Mountain Twenty is the great rarity of the series.

Two other firms struck Colorado gold in 1861 and are rarer still. Dr. John Parsons, a physician turned assayer at Tarryall in South Park, struck undated $2.50 and $5 pieces showing a quartz stamp mill, with his name misspelled PARSON on the smaller coin; fewer than ten of each survive. J. J. Conway & Co., bankers at Georgia Gulch in Summit County, struck undated $2.50, $5 and $10 pieces in August 1861, and only a handful of each are known, several in the Smithsonian. These are coins rather than exonumia, strictly speaking, but no Colorado collector draws the line that hard.

A private mint today

Daniel Carr's Moonlight Mint in Loveland is the working heir to all of this. Carr designed the New York and Rhode Island state quarters and was a finalist for the Sacagawea dollar reverse; in 2007 he bought a 1986 Gräbener press that the Denver Mint had used for fifteen years to strike commemoratives and medals, restored it, and has struck his own designs on it since 2008. The output runs to fantasy-date overstrikes, Hard Times and pioneer-token tributes, Lesher-dollar tributes, medals and bullion pieces, and since 2013 he has also traded under the revived name Clark Gruber & Company. His catalog, with mintage figures, is kept on the Moonlight Mint site and the store is at dc-coin.com.

Catalogs for Colorado tokens

  • Stuart M. Pritchard Jr., A Guide to Colorado Merchant Trade Tokens. Jinglebob Press, Louisville, Colorado, 2004, 425 pp. The current standard. Numbers are a town prefix and a serial: PU for Pueblo, DE for Denver, and so on.
  • James R. Wright and Herbert Lee Nott, Colorado Merchants' Tokens. Self-published, two volumes, 1977 and 1979, with a supplement; an earlier edition appeared in 1973. The CMT numbers in older auction catalogs come from here.
  • For Lesher dollars, Hibler and Kappen's So-Called Dollars and the 2017 Leonard, Hallenbeck and Wilde book; see the Lesher page.
  • For transportation tokens, the Atwood-Coffee catalog's Colorado section; for coal scrip, Edkins. Both are on the decoder.

Museums

  • ANA Money Museum, 818 N. Cascade Ave., Colorado Springs. The American Numismatic Association's own museum, with Lesher dollars and Clark Gruber coins in its Colorado exhibit. Open Tuesday through Saturday; admission charged, ANA members free. money.org/money-museum
  • Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, 215 S. Tejon St., Colorado Springs. Free. Adna Wilde's Lesher pieces were shown here for some years; the online collection search is worth a look. cspm.org
  • Steelworks Center of the West, El Pueblo History Museum and the Pueblo Heritage Museum are on the Pueblo page.

Clubs and shows

  • Colorado Springs Numismatic Society, founded 1966. Second Sunday of the month at 2 p.m. Its members have included Kenneth Bressett, William Henderson, Ed Rochette and Adna Wilde. cscc.anaclubs.org/csns_home.htm
  • Colorado Springs Coin Club, founded 1962. Fourth Tuesday of the month at 6:30 p.m., Fraternal Order of Eagles, 1055 21st St., Colorado Springs. cscc.anaclubs.org/cscc_home.htm
  • Colorado Springs Coin Show, the two clubs' joint show, held in late June. The 2026 show was June 26 and 27 at Elks Lodge 309, 3400 N. Nevada Ave.
  • The Colorado-Wyoming Numismatic Association, founded 1952, issued convention medals from the 1950s to the 1990s that turn up regularly; the association itself was dissolved in 2018. Pueblo's own coin club appears to be dormant.

Sources