Higley Bolen Copies

About This Coin

Created by John Adams Bolen of Springfield, Massachusetts during the 1860s, the Higley Bolen Copies are carefully executed reproductions of the extremely rare Higley coppers originally struck by Dr. Samuel Higley of Granby, Connecticut around 1737. Bolen, a talented die sinker who produced copies and fantasies of numerous colonial American coins, crafted these pieces with sufficient skill that they have earned respect as collectible items in their own right rather than being dismissed as mere forgeries. The original Higley coppers — bearing legends such as "THE VALUE OF THREE PENCE" and "I AM GOOD COPPER" along with distinctive deer and broad axe designs — rank among the most celebrated and valuable of all American colonial coins, with genuine examples selling for six figures when they appear at auction. Bolen's copies preserve the essential design elements of these legendary originals while exhibiting telltale differences in die work, metal composition, and overall execution that allow experienced collectors to distinguish them from authentic Higleys. The numismatic community has long recognized Bolen's work as a distinct collecting category, with the Kenney reference catalog providing die numbers and rarity ratings for his various productions. Struck in copper and occasionally in other metals, Bolen copies circulated among the burgeoning coin collecting community of the Civil War era, when American numismatics was experiencing its first great growth period and demand for colonial rarities far exceeded the available supply of genuine pieces. Today, properly attributed Higley Bolen Copies trade actively in the colonial specialist market, valued both as examples of nineteenth-century die-sinking artistry and as accessible alternatives to the essentially unobtainable original Higley coppers.