A Fond Farewell to the US Penny

Gosh, its a bit nostalgic to realize the United States is quitting the one cent piece aka the penny. It’s had a long run…since 1787! We quit the half cent piece in 1857, and for similar reasons: lack of use and expense of copper. Now the coin we call the Penny, a British term, actually the one cent piece, is also trending out of use and too expensive to mint.

So, what to do? We love the copper penny, and the tradition of the penny being a qualified manner of dating weathervanes. Solution: create a custom commemorative copper token that will both display the weather vane’s creation year and it’s West Coast Weather Vanes origin.

An interesting penny story: Some years back we created a large Teapot and Cups Weathervane for the Boston Tea Party Museum. Sealed inside the Teapot & Cups are three coins. One, a 1773 British copper penny bearing the image of George III, marks the year the Boston Tea Party occurred and is the penny that was in circulation in the colonies at the time, as there were no United States and all currency was British. We were so surprised when this penny arrived in the mail because it was bigger than our current quarter!

The US penny has a storied history. If you want to take a deeper dive, a link to the very informative wikipedia page is here.

West Coast Weathervanes