April 28, 2008: "Legal Tender in New Jersey"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
Once again we decided to get serious, by relating some interesting historical fact about the featured coin with the hope of inducing the reader to pause and say "Hey, I did not know that."

In this case, we focused our efforts on the description of this item in Sylvester Crosby’s ‘Early Coins of America’, published in 1875, in which he included the actual passage from the ‘Grants, Concessions and Original Constitutions of the Province of New-Jersey’ from May 8th, 1682 (we also thought it was interesting that the name New Jersey was apparently hyphenated in those days).

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We briefly considered using the actual text from 1682 in our ad, but decided that this might be a tad too wordy:

"Mark Newbie’s half-pence, called Patricks halfpence, shall, from and after the said Eighteenth Instant, pass for half-pence Current pay of this province, provided that he, the said Mark, give sufficient Security to the Speaker of this House, for the use of the General Assembly from Time to Time being, that he said Mark, his Executor and Administrators, shall and will change the said half-pence for pay Equivalent, upon demand: and provided also, that no Person or Persons be hereby obliged to take more than five Shillings in one Payment."

So we went with our abridged version instead.