Some date to 17, after Samuel Higley died at sea while taking a shipment of copper to England. One bears the image of a broad axe with the words, “I CUT MY WAY THROUGH.” Another has the spokes of a wheel and the legend, “THE WHEEL GOES ROUND.”įour kinds of Higley copper have a hammer on the back, while three have an ax. What Goes ‘RoundĪll except one have a deer and the numeral three on the tails side. They probably had more stable value than colonial paper money, he wrote. “It is likely that a large number and a variety of sellers accepted Higley Coppers in transactions for goods and services,” wrote Greg Reynolds in Coin Week. Thousands, mostly dated 1737, circulated in the region. Whatever the story, Higley struck a version of the coin that said, “VALUE ME AS YOU PLEASE,” on one side, and “I AM GOOD COPPER” on the other.Ĭoin collectors, though, say his local prominence as a businessman and landowner helped establish the value of the Higley coppers. Another story says people started complaining the coin wasn’t worth two-and-a-half cents more than the British halfpennies then circulating. One version of the Higley copper legend has it that Simsbury’s local tavernkeeper stopped accepting Higley’s threepence after he’d accumulated quite a few of them. But the colonists suffered a shortage of small coins, and the British authorities couldn’t always enforce the law. John Hull had minted coins in Massachusetts Bay Colony until English authorities shut him down in 1682. Making your own coins, as you might suspect, violated the law in the 1730s. And it isn’t clear if he himself made the steel dies or struck the coins from them. Samuel Higley undoubtedly had help mining his copper. Today, the state operates the Old Newgate Prison as a museum.īack in the 1730s, copper mines were small-scale operations, and much of the metal ended up in England. In 1776, revolutionaries turned the mine into a POW camp, and later the state made it into a prison called Newgate. Today, little remains of the once-thriving industry. brass manufacturing, which centered in Waterbury, Conn., the world’s leader in brass production. Mines stretched up and down the Connecticut Valley and dotted the surrounding hills. The Connecticut copper industry, which lasted about two centuries, began in Copper Hill in Simsbury around 1707 and ended in Bristol in 1953. He’d then take it home and strike coins from it. Higley could walk into it with a pick and simply stab a lump of pure metal. People said the mine had such rich copper that Dr. That same year he bought a tract of 143 acres in what is now East Granby and began mining the land. So the Connecticut General Court gave Higley a 10-year monopoly on steelmaking. Several days later he brought it back, and the blacksmiths found it ‘good steel,’ the first they’d ever seen. Two blacksmiths testified that Higley had come into their shop, asked for a pound or two of iron and said he’d make it into steel. In 1728, he told the Connecticut General Court he had ‘with great pains and cost’ discovered a ‘curious art’ by which he could transmute iron into good steel. He is credited with making the first steel in the U.S. Before his marriage to Abigail Bement in 1719 he taught school. He also learned blacksmithing and picked up metallurgical and mining skills. Samuel Higley, born around 1687 in Simsbury, Conn., attended Yale College for two years and trained as a doctor. 19th-century drawing of a Higley copper The Higley Copperĭr.
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