½ Penny Birmingham - Washington - Grate

Clark & Harris issued this piece through the Soho Mint operation network during the height of the British provincial token boom, when a near-total collapse of regal copper coinage in circulation forced merchants and manufacturers across the Midlands to commission their own halfpennies. Birmingham was the epicenter of this private coinage — Matthew Boulton's infrastructure made high-quality struck copper available to anyone willing to pay for a die.

The Washington connection places this squarely in a short-lived export and novelty market; Anglo-American trade tokens referencing the first president were fashionable briefly in the mid-1790s before U.S. authorities moved to suppress foreign copper circulating domestically.