The Weekley Collection

An American Coin-Collecting Legacy Beginning in 1868

Every old coin has traveled through history. A coin preserved within a family collection carries another story as well the story of the people who recognized its significance, protected it, and passed it forward.

The M.T Weekley Collection traces its recorded beginnings to 1868, when Talmadge began collecting coins in the unsettled years following the Civil War. America was rebuilding. Commerce was changing, communities were expanding westward, and the nation's coinage still reflected the upheavals and ambitions of the nineteenth century.

In that setting, Talmage began what would become an enduring family tradition.

Over the generations, the collection traveled with the Weekley family from the Ohio River Valley to Michigan and eventually across the country. Its journey followed the family's own through new communities, changing circumstances, and successive generations of caretakers.

Each generation left its mark. Coins inherited from parents and grandparents were preserved. New pieces were added as interests and opportunities changed. Portions of the collection were occasionally sold, while others remained with the family and continued their journey.

The result was never a collection sealed away at a single moment in time. It was something more personal: a living collection, shaped and reshaped by the people entrusted with it.

Today, Pop's Change Exchange is honored to offer selected coins from the Weekley Collection, including Seated Liberty half dimes and silver three-cent pieces, coins that collectors have long known by the distinctive name "trimes."

Coins from a Changing America

The coins in this offering date primarily from the 1830s through the 1850s, decades before the collection's oral tradition beginning in 1868. They come from an era when American money looked and felt very different from the coins we carry today.

These were the years of canals and railroads, westward migration, growing cities, and rapidly expanding commerce. Small silver denominations played an important role in everyday exchange, passing from hand to hand in shops, markets, post offices, and countless ordinary transactions.

The Seated Liberty half dime was one such coin. Smaller than the modern dime, it carried Christian Gobrecht's enduring image of Liberty seated upon a rock, holding a shield and a pole topped by a liberty cap. The design appeared across several nineteenth-century silver denominations and became one of the defining images of American coinage before the Civil War.

The half dimes represented in this offering include dates from 1837 through 1858. Among the holder-identified pieces are an 1837 Large Date, examples attributed to the New Orleans Mint, and coins bearing arrows beside the date. Those arrows marked a change in the denomination's authorized silver weight, transforming a seemingly minor design detail into visible evidence of a larger adjustment in the nation's monetary system.

The New Orleans issues carry an additional sense of place. Struck at a Southern branch mint established to serve a growing region, such coins entered circulation far from Philadelphia and may have traveled widely before eventually becoming part of the change hoard.

Alongside the half dimes are silver three-cent pieces dated 1852 and 1853. Commonly called trimes, these remarkable coins are among the smallest silver pieces produced for circulation by the United States.

The denomination emerged from a practical need. In an age when even a few cents possessed meaningful purchasing power, Americans needed a convenient coin for modest transactions, including the newly reduced three-cent postage rate. The result was a tiny silver coin with a denomination unlike anything found in American pockets today.

Its small size can make the trime seem delicate or almost improbable to modern eyes. Yet that very quality brings the economic world of the 1850s into sharper focus. These coins belonged to a time when three cents mattered, silver circulated in everyday commerce, and the contents of a person's pocket were shaped by a monetary system still finding its modern form.

Collected in the Aftermath of the Civil War

By the time collection began around 1868, the United States had been profoundly changed.

The Civil War had ended only three years earlier. The familiar Seated Liberty design remained part of the nation's coinage, but many earlier half dimes and trimes already represented an older chapter of American commerce. Some may still have appeared in circulation; others were becoming reminders of the antebellum economy and the turbulent years that followed.

For a collector living in 1868, these were not distant antiquities. They were tangible survivors of recent history.

We do not know precisely what first drew the Weekley's to collecting. Perhaps it was an appreciation for the artistry of the designs, an interest in dates and mintmarks, or the realization that the coins passing out of use deserved to be preserved. Whatever the original inspiration, the tradition he began endured far beyond his own lifetime.

That continuity gives the collection its character. Its importance lies not merely in the age of the individual coins, but in the long stewardship that kept the collection alive.

A Provenance Built Across Generations

Historical provenance is strongest when its boundaries are stated clearly.

The precise acquisition date of every coin in this offering has not been documented, and Pop's Change Exchange does not represent that each piece was personally acquired in 1868 or thereafter. Some coins may have entered the collection during later generations as family members preserved earlier holdings, pursued their own interests, and added pieces along the way.

Their provenance is their documented place within the broader Family Collection: a multigenerational assemblage with a collecting tradition traced to Talmadge in 1868.

This is not the story of a collection left entirely untouched. It is the story of one that lived alongside a family. It moved when they moved. It changed as they changed. It survived decisions to preserve, expand, divide, and sometimes sell. Through all of that, its identity as a family collection remained.

That honest, evolving history is what makes these coins distinctive. Each one carries two connected narratives: the national history embodied in its design, denomination, mint, and date, and the private history of a family that valued coin collecting across generations.

From Their Collection to Yours

Pop's Change Exchange is privileged to serve as the next steward in this story by presenting selected pieces from the Weekley Collection through our website and individual online auctions.

For today's collector, acquiring one of these coins means more than obtaining a surviving half dime or trime. It is an opportunity to continue a chain of stewardship that began more than a century and a half ago.

The next chapter will belong to those who receive them collectors who will study their details, appreciate their history, protect them, and perhaps one day pass them forward again.

Struck in nineteenth-century America. Preserved through generations of the family. Now offered from their collection to yours.