1 Sou Belleville - 16 cherry leaves / 3 shamrocks

The Belleville tokens — named for the Ontario town where they were likely struck by James Watt & Co. — flooded into Lower Canada during the late 1830s to address a chronic shortage of official small change. Colonial authorities had repeatedly failed to authorize adequate copper coinage, leaving merchants to import privately struck tokens by the barrel. The specific leaf and shamrock count variants like this one arose from multiple die combinations across different production runs, which is why Breton assigned three separate catalog numbers to closely related pieces.

The 1837 Rebellions briefly disrupted token circulation in the Montreal district, but commerce resumed quickly enough that many of these pieces saw heavy use before Confederation-era coinage finally rationalized the supply.