The Castorland Company was a French emigrant venture launched in the early 1790s to settle a tract of land in northern New York, drawing heavily from aristocrats and bourgeois investors fleeing revolutionary France. These pieces were struck in Paris by Dupré — the same engraver responsible for the Hercule coinage of the Republic — and functioned as company tokens rather than government-issued currency, intended partly as promotional objects and partly as receipts tied to land shares.
The gold-plated version was almost certainly produced for presentation purposes. The company's actual settlement at Castorland, near present-day Carthage, New York, collapsed by 1814 after years of mismanagement and investor abandonment.
The Castorland Company was a French emigrant venture launched in the early 1790s to settle a tract of land in northern New York, drawing heavily from aristocrats and bourgeois investors fleeing revolutionary France. These pieces were struck in Paris by Dupré — the same engraver responsible for the Hercule coinage of the Republic — and functioned as company tokens rather than government-issued currency, intended partly as promotional objects and partly as receipts tied to land shares.
The gold-plated version was almost certainly produced for presentation purposes. The company's actual settlement at Castorland, near present-day Carthage, New York, collapsed by 1814 after years of mismanagement and investor abandonment.