About 100 of the pressed pennies in the collection are from the USA, not including the NYC ones I covered yesterday. While a few are hard to decipher, I think I have pennies from eleven states: New York, California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Florida, Connecticut, Vermont, Nevada and Hawaii.
These can be divided into two broad groups: attraction specific and location specific. The above are examples of the former, which were pressed at tourist attractions in Salem, Rochester, Gilroy and Orlando. Salem in particular was a treasure trove of penny machines, and there’s at least a dozen different ones in the collection.
Here’s some more pressed at tourist attractions. You can see the variety of size here, which varies depends on the strength of the machine. When you turn the crank on the older machines you can feel the gears turning as the die squashes the penny, but many of the newer machines are electronic and the pennies they vend are usually of identical size.
The above are some location-specific examples. Strangely, considering Bernard and I have been there a few times, there’s only a single Vegas penny in the collection. The detail on the one on the right (from New Hampshire) is extremely high, which I noted since I’ve read on collectors sites that some believe the overall quality of the dies & machines is declining.
A few years ago on our northeast road trip Kristin and I hunted pennies for Bernard as part of a deal I’d made with him. We used a website to track down machines, prepared a bag of quarters and clean coins, and in those few days pressed a total of 72 pennies! It was fun finding new machines and a little disappointing when we found broken ones.
I believe the above two were obtained on that trip, and they’re the only ones I have with sports teams on them. Usually I never would have pressed these, but my goal was to astonish Bernard with an abundance of new coins 🙂
Pennies often share themes, and I’ve got a few with the US flag and sharks, but the most common motif in the collection is mermaids! All five are shown above, from four different cities. You can see the ones from Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz have the same art, albeit at a slightly different size.
I’m not done with US coins, and tomorrow I’ll have a few subsets. Including perhaps the most ‘valuable’ coins in this small collection…