1652 New England (NE) Threepence

A colony makes its own money

In 1652 Massachusetts Bay had no coins of its own and too many bad ones from elsewhere. The silversmith John Hull wrote in his diary that 'much counterfeit coin' had come into the country, causing losses and a stoppage of trade. The General Court responded with a Mint Act of May 26-27, 1652, ordering silver coined to the sterling standard, every shilling to weigh three pennyweight.

The court chose Hull as mintmaster, and Hull chose his friend Robert Sanderson as partner. Anyone could bring them silver in any form, from worn or counterfeit coins to flatware and hollowware, and receive properly assayed coins back, less 6.5 percent for Hull's expenses and 1.25 percent for silver lost in assaying.

No other mint, public or private, opened on American soil for decades after. The Boston mint struck silver threepences, sixpences and shillings in four designs from 1652 to 1682, the best known and most numerous being the Pine Tree shillings of its last decade. The very first were the NE coins.

Silversmiths, not engravers

Hull and Sanderson were silversmiths, and the NE coins look like it. A sheet of silver was clipped to the right size and weight, and two punches were struck into it, like a silversmith's hallmark: NE for New England on one side, and the value in pence, XII, VI or III, on the other. The rest of the coin was blank.

Hull was paid a share of the coins he struck, and every coin took the same work whatever its value. Making 400 threepences took far more cutting and counting than making 100 shillings, so very few small coins were made. About 70 NE shillings are known today and just seven NE sixpences. The threepence is by far the rarest.

The plain design had a flaw: with so much empty silver and no protective edge, the coins invited clippers to shave slivers off before passing them. On October 19, 1652, the General Court ordered a new design with a double ring reaching the edge, a tree at the center, the date and inscriptions. NE coins were therefore struck only for a few months in the summer and early fall of 1652. Mintage figures are unknown.

Abigail Adams's family connection

By the American Revolution, NE coins were already historical curiosities. In the autumn of 1781 the English collector Thomas Brand Hollis asked John Adams, then the American envoy to the Netherlands, to help him find one. On October 21, 1781, Adams wrote to his wife Abigail: 'I have great Occasion for a few of the New England shillings.' He asked again on January 4, 1782.

Abigail was born a Quincy, and the Quincys had a family tie to the mint itself. Her great-grandfather Edmund Quincy came to Boston with his father in 1633; after his father's death, his mother married Robert Hull, the mintmaster's father, which made Edmund Quincy and John Hull stepbrothers.

When this threepence surfaced, it was in a pasteboard box, since lost, inscribed in an early 19th-century hand 'Silver token unknown / From Quincy Family / B. Ma. Dec. 1798.' The coin is thought to have come from the Quincy family, and John Adams served in the Netherlands in the 1780s, but how it reached a Dutch cabinet is not documented.

From a cabinet in the Netherlands to a world record

For more than a century, collectors could not own an NE threepence at all. Only two were known in the 19th century: the discovery coin at Yale College, drawn for the college's 1863 catalog, and one in the collection of William Sumner Appleton. When Appleton died in 1903 his coins went to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which has held its threepence since 1905. The Yale coin later vanished; an inventory after a major theft in the 1960s found it gone, and it has never been recovered. Its drawing shows it is not the coin found in the Netherlands.

The new coin was discovered in an old cabinet in the Netherlands, described in some reports as in Amsterdam, around 2016, and its owner did not identify it until 2020. After metallurgical testing, overlay analysis and comparison with the Massachusetts Historical Society coin, PCGS authenticated and graded it EF-45, and its discovery was announced in September 2024. PCGS president Stephanie Sabin called it one of the most important coins in all of American numismatics.

It was offered on November 18, 2024, in a sale of early American coins. After a 12-minute bidding contest, it sold for $2,520,000, more than three times the in-house presale estimate and nearly $2 million above the previous record of $646,250 for an American coin struck before the Revolution, set by an NE sixpence in 2014. It was also a record for any non-gold U.S. coin struck before the founding of the U.S. Mint. Its silver was worth $1.03 that day.

What it looks like

The coin is an irregular disc of silver about the size of a nickel, 20.2 by 21.3 millimeters, weighing 17.0 grains. The obverse carries the NE punch in a shaped outline, fully outlined and slightly doubled at the top. The reverse carries III, its border missing at the top. Everything else is plain silver.

It shows planchet splits above the N, to the right of the punch and at 3 and 9 o'clock, scattered hairline scratches, a shallow central depression suggesting the planchet was lightly bent, and a small dent below the NE. The obverse is deep antique gray; the reverse is a lighter golden gray.

It is clearly the finer of the two survivors: the Massachusetts Historical Society coin is somewhat flattened and has a large hole on its left side. The variety is catalogued as Noe 1-A and Salmon 1-A.

The numbers

Mintage

Unknown; very small, struck for a few months of 1652

Known survivors

2 (one in the Massachusetts Historical Society); the Yale coin is lost

Weight

17.0 grains (about 1.1 grams)

Size

20.2 x 21.3 mm, irregular

Composition

Silver, sterling standard

Makers

John Hull and Robert Sanderson, silversmiths

Design

Punches only: NE / III

Catalog numbers

Noe 1-A, Salmon 1-A, W-1; Rarity-8

This coin's grade

PCGS EF-45; the only NE threepence ever certified

Timeline

1. 1633

   Edmund Quincy, Abigail Adams's great-grandfather, arrives in Boston.

2. May 1652

   The Massachusetts General Court passes the Mint Act; John Hull and Robert Sanderson open the Boston mint.

3. 1652

   NE threepences, sixpences and shillings are struck for a few months.

4. Oct 19, 1652

   The General Court orders a new design to stop clipping, ending the NE coinage.

5. 1682

   The Boston mint's coinage ends.

6. Oct 21, 1781

   John Adams asks Abigail to find New England shillings for a collector.

7. Dec 1798

   The date on the box label: 'Silver token unknown / From Quincy Family.'

8. 1863

   Yale College's catalog publishes a drawing of its NE threepence.

9. 1903

   William Sumner Appleton dies; his NE threepence goes to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

10. 1905

    The Massachusetts Historical Society takes custody of the Appleton coin.

11. 1960s

    An inventory after a theft at Yale finds its NE threepence missing.

12. 2016

    This coin is found in an old cabinet in the Netherlands.

13. 2020

    The owner identifies the coin as an NE threepence.

14. Sep 2024

    PCGS announces it has authenticated and graded the coin EF-45.

15. Nov 18, 2024

    The coin sells for $2,520,000, a record for any pre-Revolutionary American coin.

The world in 1652

• Apr 6, 1652

  Jan van Riebeeck sets up a Dutch East India Company supply station that becomes Cape Town.

• May 18, 1652

  Rhode Island enacts the first North American law prohibiting slavery.

• May 19, 1652

  The Battle of Dover opens the First Anglo-Dutch War.

• Jul 2, 1652

  The Battle of the Faubourg St Antoine is fought outside Paris during the Fronde.

• Jul 10, 1652

  England formally declares war on the Dutch Republic.

• Oct 8, 1652

  The English defeat the Dutch at the Battle of the Kentish Knock.

• Nov 30, 1652

  The Dutch win a decisive naval victory at Dungeness.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, 1652 New England (NE) Threepence is number 14 of 100 in the coins entries of the FLOAT 100. 96 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (80 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Its silver content was worth about $1.03 on the day it sold for $2.52 million.
• John Adams wrote to Abigail in 1781 asking her to send New England shillings to Europe for a collector.
• Abigail Adams's great-grandfather and mintmaster John Hull were stepbrothers.
• The coin's lost box was labeled 'Silver token unknown' — its owners had no idea what it was.
• Only about 70 NE shillings and seven NE sixpences are known, against two threepences.
• The NE design lasted only from late spring to October 1652, when clipping forced a redesign.