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History
My 1816 Large Cent
The Year Without a Summer or Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death
This is my 1816 Large Cent. Notice that I don’t call her a penny. The British had pennies. The United States had and still has a decimal system for its money.
Thomas Jefferson proposed that decimal system with one hundred cents to a dollar and Ben Franklin had designed the very first cent sized coin in 1792, although it didn’t actually say “Cent” anywhere on it.
Those gentleman might have been annoyed if you referred to her by the British term. We had just fought a war with those Brits, after all. But penny was the name common people were used to, so it has stuck with us. Our pennies still stubbornly announce themselves as “One Cent” despite that.
She saw some history
My coin is no beauty, is she? Knocked about, jangled in many a pocket and purse, and she ran into something really hard and sharp at some time in her long life. She has her scars.
But I love her. She’s over two hundred years old and she’s full of spunk and character! I do have prettier coins in my collection, but I always smile when I look at her. She’s special exactly because she is not pretty.
