This has long been considered one of the major rarities of the Hard Times Token field. Because of the disposal of a number of old-time collections in the past 15 years, no less than six Low 87 tokens have reached the auction block.

1. In 1988 Stacks offered the Herbert Oechsner specimen which was graded Good. It was quite weakly struck at the right obverse/ left reverse and had most of the central portion of the reverse missing, It realized $4,620.00.

2. The next specimen to appear was in Stack’s 1989 sale of the Gil Steinberg Collection, where an example graded Very Fine was offered struck on a clipped planchet which affected the outer edge of one of the rosettes. This piece had full legends on both sides, although it did have a small edge bruise left of the date. It brought $5,775.00.

3. The third example to appear was the Brand/Zeddies pieces offered by B&M in 1990. That token was graded a cleaned XF. It brought $9,350,00.

4. The forth example to appeared in our 1993 Auction Fifty Four where an unevenly struck Fine example brought $3300.00.

5. In our 1999 Hard Times Sale, #43, we offered a F/VF example which was silver plated after striking. That example brought $2750.00.

6. In our 1999 Centola Sale, #25, we sold Chet Krause’s Very Fine example with both sides of the planchet bearing a light encrustation of old corrosion for $3190.00.

(H. Joseph Levine, PCAC, The Charles Litman Collection, December 6, 2003)

Despite the large number of hard Times Tokens sold in recent years (including the Litman collection sold by PCAC with two L.87s), the total number of L.87’s known is certainly under 10 specimens. Boutwell remained in business for many years, issuing a large number of Civil War Tokens.

(Stacks, the John J. Ford Collection, Part IV, June 23rd, 2004)