A silver coin, minted at the first colonial mint in 1652, was recently auctioned off for $2.52 million, setting a record for pre-Revolution coins. Photo by Stack’s Bowers Galleries.

By Lilli Dwyer
InkFreeNews

NEW YORK — In 1652, New England settlers opened their own mint against the rules established by the British royalty that governed them.

One of the rare coins made at this mint recently sold at auction for $2.52 million, a record-setting sum. The coin, about the size of a nickel, weighs about 1.1 grams and has a silver melt value of $1.03. Most coins made in this style, with an “NE” for New England on one side and a Roman numeral denoting the value of three pence on the other, have been lost to history. The Boston mint likely only manufactured them for a few months.

The auction at Stack’s Bowers Gallery took place Nov. 19. The $2.52 million dollar sale set a new world record for an American coin made before the American Revolution, with the previous record at $646,250. It set another record for a non-gold United States coin made before the founding of the U.S. Mint.

The auction house says the coin was discovered in a cabinet in the Netherlands in 2016, with a note saying, “Silver token unknown/From Quincy Family/B. Ma. 1798.”

In 1781, future president John Adams was the American ambassador to the Netherlands. When English coin collector Thomas Brand Hollis wrote to Adams asking for coins minted in New England, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, asking her to ship him a few.

It’s unknown if this threepence is one of the coins shipped to Adams, but the auction house believes a connection is likely.

The colonial mint in Boston was opened over a century before the colonies would declare their independence from British rule. According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was running low on money in 1652. England was reluctant to send silver and gold over to the colonies, as they were in short supply themselves.

Boston authorities allowed two settlers, John Hull and Robert Sanderson, to open the mint, which ran from 1652 to 1682. The coins manufactured there came to be used as currency throughout the Northeast, not just in Massachusetts.

The Boston Mint made silver threepences, sixpences and shillings in four different designs. The most common and well known is the pine tree shilling, bearing the image of the pine tree, as pine lumber for ships was one of the colony’s biggest exports.

All coins made at the mint were stamped with the year 1652, regardless of when they were made. That year was in a period when England had no king and was instead a republic. The museum posits taming the coins with that year may have been a tactic to avoid prosecution from royal authorities if the monarchy came back into power.

The only other known New England threepence has been in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s collection for the past 120 years. A threepence belonging to Yale University was lost sometime before the middle of the 20th century.