3 Pfennige

Rostock's copper small change of the 1850s belongs to the last gasp of German municipal coinage before the political consolidation that followed 1866 swept away most local minting rights. The city had maintained its own coinage intermittently for centuries as a Free Imperial City and later as part of the Mecklenburg orbit, but issues of this period were purely practical — filling a gap in everyday commerce that larger territorial coinages left unaddressed.

The German monetary unification of 1857, which established the Vereinsthaler system, rendered this denomination obsolete within a few years of striking.