1/2 Kreuzer - William II

Upper Hesse was a Prussian administrative province, not a sovereign state, yet it issued distinctive copper small change under its own provincial identity throughout the 1820s. This was a transitional oddity of the post-Napoleonic German territorial reorganization — Prussia absorbed Hessian territories but allowed localized coinage to persist briefly before standardization swept it away.

KM#581 is among the last issues before Prussia consolidated its currency across the Rhine provinces and Westphalia in the early 1830s.