Abel Buell: the counterfeiter who engraved America's first coins

In 1764, a young Connecticut silversmith was caught raising the value of colonial paper notes — taking a five-pound plate and re-engraving it into a higher denomination. The skill that made him good at his trade made him a dangerous forger. His name was Abel Buell, and he was barely past twenty.

The punishment was brutal and public. He was to be branded on the forehead with a letter marking his crime, have part of his ear cut off, and forfeit his property. The colony went through with it — but softened the blow because of his youth. The historian John Warner Barber, writing in 1836, recorded the strange, vivid detail that the people of Buell's town never forgot: "The tip only of Buell's ear was cropped off: it was held on his tongue to keep it warm till it was put on the ear again, where it grew on."

That should have been the end of him. Instead it was the beginning of one of the most improbable careers in early America. Buell talked his way back into society the only way he knew how — with his hands. He invented a machine for cutting and polishing gemstones, made a ring on it, and gave that ring to the very prosecutor who had convicted him. His sentence was eased. Within a decade the same colony that had marked him as a criminal would trust him to engrave its money.

Buell was, over one lifetime, a goldsmith, a jeweler, an engraver, a printer, a surveyor, an inventor, a cotton-mill owner, and a maker of coins. He was also restless, charming, and forever a step ahead of his debts. He is the reason the United States can point to a piece of metal and say: an American made this, here, first.

Buell learned his trade the hard way. As a boy he was apprenticed to the silversmith Ebenezer Chittenden in Madison, Connecticut — close family, since Buell would marry into the Chittenden line. Silversmithing in that era meant engraving: cutting fine lines and lettering into metal by hand, in reverse, so the impression came out right. That single skill — the ability to carve a clean image into hard metal — sat behind everything he later did, the honest work and the criminal.

What set Buell apart was that he didn't stop at one craft. He built tools. He designed a minting press said to stamp 120 coins a minute — fast for the 1780s, when most coining was slow handwork. He cut and cast the first printing type made in the United States, founding the country's first type foundry. Type here means the metal letters a printer locks into a press; before Buell, American printers imported theirs from Britain. He even traveled to England in 1789 to smuggle out the secrets of cotton machinery, then built one of Connecticut's earliest cotton mills.

His most famous non-coin work shows the same instinct. In 1784 he engraved, printed, and published A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America — the first map of the new nation made entirely by an American, on American presses. He cut the copper plates himself, printed it in sections, and colored it by hand. It was also the first map to be copyrighted in the United States. Only a handful of copies survive; the Library of Congress holds one.

So when Connecticut and, soon after, the new federal government needed someone who could engrave a coin die and build the machine to strike it and refine the copper to feed it, there was a short list. Buell's name was on it.

In 1785, Connecticut authorized its own copper coinage, and a group of investors formed the Company for Coining Coppers in New Haven. Every partner but one put in only money. Buell put in everything else — he became the manager, the machinist, and the engraver. He cut the dies (the hardened metal stamps that press the design into a blank) for the first Connecticut coppers, borrowing the look of the British George III halfpenny: an armored bust facing right, with a seated figure on the reverse. Connecticut coppers were struck from 1785 to 1788, and Buell's hand is on the earliest of them.

That New Haven operation is where Buell's story brushes against the most famous coin in early American history. In 1787 the Congress of the Confederation contracted James Jarvis — who had gained control of the same New Haven mint — to strike copper cents to a federal standard. The design was specified by Congress and is usually traced to Benjamin Franklin: a sundial and blazing sun with the Latin Fugio ("I fly," meaning time flies) and the blunt motto Mind Your Business, with thirteen linked rings and We Are One on the reverse. These were the Fugio cents — the first coins struck under the authority of the United States.

Buell did not get the federal contract; Jarvis did, partly through a bribe to a Treasury official. But the dies still had to be cut, and the best-executed Fugio dies are attributed by numismatists to Buell, working within Jarvis's company at the New Haven mint he had built. The coins themselves were struck on his style of press — by laborers including an enslaved man named Aaron, identified only recently from the mint's ledgers, who worked the press for wages paid to the man who held him. Roughly 400,000 Fugios reached the Treasury in 1788 before the contract collapsed for failing to deliver.

So the honest answer to "did Abel Buell make the first U.S. coin?" is: he engraved Connecticut's first coins outright, and his dies and his machinery stand behind the Fugio cent — even though the design was Franklin's and the contract was Jarvis's. For a man once branded for ruining money, it is a remarkable place to land.