OCTOBER 19
1652•Willow Tree / Massachusetts Tree Coinage
2017•American Liberty 225th Silver Medal Set
Massachusetts Orders a Tree on Its Silver Coinage
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On October 19, 1652, the Massachusetts General Court ordered an important redesign of the colony’s new silver money. Instead of the simple NE punch and denomination used on the earliest pieces, the colony directed that its coins carry a double ring, the word MASATHVSETS, a tree in the center, NEW ENGLAND, the year 1652, and the denomination in Roman numerals. The order created the visual formula that would define the famous Massachusetts “tree coinage.”
The first coins produced under the new concept are known today as Willow Tree shillings, sixpence, and threepence. They were followed by Oak Tree and Pine Tree types.
These crude-looking silver pieces are among the most historically important coins made in colonial America. They represent an English colony solving a chronic shortage of dependable money by establishing its own mint—an act that pushed the boundaries of colonial authority.
Money Was Scarce in Colonial New England
Seventeenth-century Massachusetts had no steady supply of English coins.
Colonists traded using a mixture of foreign silver, commodity money, barter, bills, and locally accepted media of exchange.
Spanish-American silver circulated widely when available.
But hard money tended to flow out of the colony to pay for imported goods.
The shortage complicated wages, taxes, retail transactions, and long-distance trade.
Even when silver arrived, it was not necessarily uniform.
Foreign coins differed in weight, fineness, wear, and local valuation.
Clipped or underweight pieces could circulate alongside better coins.
Merchants had to judge whether a coin contained enough silver to justify its stated or customary value.
A local coinage of known weight and fineness offered Massachusetts a way to make silver more predictable.
John Hull and Robert Sanderson
Massachusetts selected Boston silversmiths John Hull and Robert Sanderson to operate the mint.
Hull kept a diary that has become an important source for the colony’s coinage history.
The two men were experienced metalworkers capable of refining silver, preparing blanks, engraving or punching dies, and producing coins.
The mint was a public-authority project carried out through private craftsmen.
In May 1652, the Massachusetts General Court authorized a mint.
The colony ordered silver coins in shilling, sixpence, and threepence denominations.
The pieces were to be made from sterling silver.
But they were intentionally lighter than comparable English coins.
The reduced weight was meant in part to discourage the new money from being exported out of Massachusetts.
The Massachusetts shilling was ordered at 72 grains.
That was below the weight of an English sterling shilling.
The sixpence and threepence were proportionally lighter.
By giving the coins a local face value higher than their bullion value abroad, Massachusetts hoped they would remain in circulation within the colony instead of being melted or exported.
It was an early attempt to manage the movement of scarce money through coin specifications.
The earliest Massachusetts silver is known as the NE coinage.
Instead of full engraved designs, the coins were made from silver blanks punched with the letters NE on one side and a Roman-numeral denomination on the other.
XII represented twelve pence, or one shilling.
VI represented sixpence.
III represented threepence.
The simplicity made the coins relatively easy to manufacture—but also vulnerable.
A nearly blank silver disk with only small punches could be clipped around its edge without obviously disturbing the design.
Someone could remove silver and still pass the lighter piece at full value.
The minimal markings were also easier to imitate than a more elaborate coin.
Massachusetts quickly recognized the weakness.
Only months after the mint began, the General Court ordered a redesigned coinage.
The October 19, 1652 Order
The General Court’s order specified a more complex format.
One side was to carry a double ring with MASATHVSETS around the border and a tree in the center.
The other side was to carry NEW ENGLAND, the year 1652, and the denomination in Roman numerals.
Bringing inscriptions and rings closer to the edge made clipping easier to detect.
The redesign also gave the colony’s money a far more distinctive identity.
The October order created the basic design concept used for the rest of Massachusetts’ silver-minting era.
Collectors divide the resulting pieces into three broad families based on the tree style: Willow Tree, Oak Tree, and Pine Tree.
The terminology is modern numismatic classification.
The seventeenth-century records did not formally name the types in that way.
But the changing tree forms provide a useful way to organize the series.
The earliest coins made under the redesigned format are called Willow Tree coins.
The tree has drooping branches that later collectors interpreted as resembling a willow.
Willow Tree pieces are famously crude.
Letters and devices can be weak, distorted, doubled, or partly missing.
Yet that roughness is part of their historical character.
The appearance resulted partly from the production method.
The coins were struck with hammer dies rather than modern presses.
Keeping the dies aligned and delivering enough force to transfer a broad design onto an irregular silver planchet was difficult.
Dies could shift between blows.
Multiple strikes produced overlapping images.
The resulting coins often look less like machine-made money and more like hand-forged artifacts—which is essentially what they are.
The Oak Tree Type
The Willow Tree design was followed by coins collectors call Oak Tree pieces.
The tree became more upright and recognizable.
The inscriptions and overall execution also evolved.
Oak Tree coinage exists in several denominations and many die varieties.
Specialists study tiny differences in branches, lettering, punctuation, numerals, and die relationships to reconstruct how the mint operated.
The final and best-known family is the Pine Tree coinage.
Pine Tree shillings have become icons of colonial American numismatics.
They are often the first coins people imagine when they hear “colonial Massachusetts money.”
Different sizes and die styles exist, and the series includes a rich variety of specialized classifications.
The Pine Tree type continued the basic October 1652 formula decades after the original order.
One of the most famous features of Massachusetts silver is that later Tree coins continued to bear the date 1652 even though production lasted far beyond that year.
Oak Tree and Pine Tree pieces were struck later, yet retained the original date.
The precise reason has long been discussed by historians.
A traditional explanation is that retaining 1652 helped associate the coinage with its original authorization and avoided advertising continued minting under later English political conditions.
Massachusetts established its mint during a remarkable moment in English history.
King Charles I had been executed in 1649.
England became a Commonwealth, and no king occupied the throne in 1652.
This temporary political environment may have made Massachusetts leaders more willing to exercise powers that would normally have been closely associated with royal sovereignty.
The colony’s coins conspicuously lacked the portrait or name of an English monarch.
The Monarchy Returns
Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660.
Massachusetts nevertheless continued producing silver coins.
That persistence became one of several sources of tension between the colony and royal authorities.
Coinage was a prerogative normally associated with sovereign power.
A colony operating a mint for decades could therefore appear to be asserting a degree of independence London did not intend to grant.
The Massachusetts silver does not proclaim independence.
Its inscriptions are geographic rather than revolutionary: MASATHVSETS and NEW ENGLAND.
Yet the very act of issuing local silver money carried political meaning.
The colony had created a medium of exchange under its own authority, with its own symbols and standards.
That made the coins practical tools of commerce and quiet statements about self-government at the same time.
Trees were deeply associated with New England’s landscape and economy.
Timber was a major resource, and tall white pines were particularly valuable for ship masts.
Later colonial disputes over the Crown’s reservation of mast trees would give the pine additional political associations.
On the coins, however, the General Court’s order simply called for “a tree.”
The specific Willow, Oak, and Pine labels are classifications applied to the evolving artistic forms.
The reverse used Roman numerals to show value.
XII indicated a shilling because twelve pence equaled one shilling.
VI represented sixpence and III threepence.
The system reflects English monetary accounting rather than the decimal structure the United States would later adopt.
More than a century would pass before federal American coins were organized around dollars, cents, and decimal fractions.
The mintmaster was compensated from the silver brought for coinage.
The original arrangement allowed a fee of one shilling from every twenty shillings coined, later modified by the colony.
That fee paid for the work and expenses of converting bullion into standardized money.
The system resembles older minting arrangements in which individuals deposited precious metal and received coin after deductions for production costs.
From Bullion to Coin
Silver arriving at the mint had to be assessed, melted, refined or alloyed to the required standard, formed into strips or blanks, adjusted to weight, and struck.
Every step was performed with seventeenth-century technology.
The finished coins vary greatly in shape and strike.
Those irregularities are not merely defects.
They are physical evidence of the manufacturing process.
Massachusetts silver did not remain confined to Boston.
The pieces circulated throughout New England and beyond.
A recognizable local silver coin of known value was useful in an economy hungry for dependable money.
The long production run also meant generations of colonists became familiar with Tree shillings.
They remained part of American monetary life long after the first Willow Tree pieces appeared.
The October redesign made abuse more difficult, but it could not eliminate it.
Precious-metal money always created incentives to clip, counterfeit, debase, or alter coins.
Massachusetts authorities periodically addressed fraudulent money and regulated acceptable coin.
The Tree design should therefore be understood as a security improvement rather than a perfect security solution.
The rings and peripheral lettering made tampering more visible.
The Massachusetts mint continued operating until roughly 1682.
That gave the colony about thirty years of locally produced silver money.
Few colonial American coinage projects matched its duration or importance.
By the time production ended, the Tree coinage had become deeply embedded in New England commerce.
Its longevity also made the mint increasingly difficult for royal authorities to ignore.
Massachusetts’ independent tendencies, including its coinage, formed part of a larger dispute with the Crown.
The colony’s original charter was ultimately annulled in 1684.
The mint was not the sole cause, but it became one of the symbols of Massachusetts exercising powers beyond what royal officials considered acceptable.
Thus the Tree coins belong not only to monetary history but also to the constitutional struggle over colonial self-government.
Survivors Are Major Colonial Collectibles
Willow Tree coins are especially scarce and highly prized.
Oak Tree and Pine Tree pieces are generally more available, though individual varieties can be formidable rarities.
Condition, strike, centering, planchet quality, die variety, and provenance all matter.
Because the coins were handmade and often circulated heavily, no two examples feel quite identical.
They are artifacts as much as standardized monetary objects.
The Pine Tree shilling entered American folklore as well as numismatics.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Pine-Tree Shillings” helped popularize the famous tale of mintmaster John Hull providing his daughter’s weight in shillings as a wedding dowry.
Historians treat the story cautiously, but its persistence shows how strongly the Massachusetts coinage entered New England cultural memory.
Few colonial coins inspired comparable legend.
October 19, 1652 marks the order that transformed Massachusetts’ primitive NE silver into one of the most distinctive coinage traditions in American history.
The General Court required a double ring, MASATHVSETS, a central tree, NEW ENGLAND, the date 1652, and the denomination.
That design framework produced the Willow Tree coinage and, through later evolution, the Oak Tree and Pine Tree series.
The change solved a practical problem by making clipping and counterfeiting more difficult, but its historical importance reached far beyond coin security.
Massachusetts had placed its own name, its own symbol, and its own monetary authority onto silver.
More than a century before the United States Mint existed, a New England colony was already demonstrating how money could express local identity, economic necessity, and political autonomy all at once.
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