This week marks the end of an era in New Hampshire, as the state stops selling highway tokens to make way for the automated E-ZPass toll system.

But the tokens won’t vanish overnight. The state plans to collect tokens at the toll plazas along New Hampshire’s highways until Jan. 1. After that, though, the future of the tiny brass-colored coins emblazoned with the craggy visage Old Man of the Mountain becomes uncertain.

“I think there’s going to be a fairly long collection period,” said Bill Boynton, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Transportation. “They’ll continue to dribble in. I was talking to someone in New Jersey the other day and they’re still collecting (highway) tokens long after they’ve been phased out.” New Jersey began phasing out tokens shortly after E-ZPass went on line across that state in 2001.
In 2004, New Hampshire sold 166,627,920 tokens (or 4,165,698 rolls of 40 tokens) to motorists. Of that number, 164,244,235 have made their way back into the hands of toll collectors. Boynton estimates there are about 5 million additional tokens out there. Like pennies, they’re lost under couch cushions, hoarded in car ashtrays, or maybe used to get a free game of skee ball at Funspot on Weirs Beach.

But if you find yourself stuck with an excess amount of tokens, what can be done? With gas prices so high they’re almost in orbit, you can forget about burning off those extra tokens with lots of autumn road trips through New Hampshire. The only place to turn is eBay. Within the last week, two sellers offering tokens were spotted on the online auction site.

Massachusetts resident Barbara Emerson put up for auction the 54 tokens she had lying around after her in-laws sold their cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee. Emerson’s tokens went quickly to a woman in Washington, who Emerson later found out was returning to New Hampshire to inter her mother’s ashes.
“I wanted to put these up before the Labor Day weekend,” Emerson said of the tokens in an e-mail, “as there will undoubtedly be people going away for vacation, and I wanted to reach those buyers. Plus, once Columbus Day passes (leaf peeping season) there won’t be many more vacationers that will be interested in the tokens.

“I figured that if they were going to be in the area, they would be of use to someone who wouldn’t otherwise have a transponder and would never buy one.”

One seller, who wished to be identified by the eBay seller name “Kid*Store,” was selling a single token at a starting price of $2.99, with an additional $2.99 for shipping.

“I placed them up more as a ‘novelty’ item in order to get people to look at my other merchandise,” the seller said in an e-mail. “I had two rolls of them I purchased several years ago and keep an ongoing listing.”

The seller has sold four tokens so far and has sent off a few more as “nice little extras” for other sales.
“I just don’t see a demand for them. If someone is going to rush out and buy a bunch to hoard them in hopes of getting rich or lining their coffers quick they are going to be disappointed,” Kid*Store said.
Greg Dollarhide, owner of Seacoast Coin and Jewelry in Hampton, is inclined to agree.

“There are transportation tokens that (become) collectible over the years, but they’re quite old, nothing in the modern sense,” he said. “A hundred years from now, it might be different,” Dollarhide concedes, but he doubts that will be the case because of the tokens’ ubiquity and the fact that they don’t carry a date, which affects collectible status.

“There’s 5 million out there … it’s sort of like baseball cards. Whether something becomes worth something remains to be seen,” he said. “I think more people will probably keep them for nostalgia … rather than any kind of worth.”

Once the state stops accepting tokens, Boynton says they’ll be counted, processed and shipped back to one of their two birthplaces: the Roger Williams Mint in Attleboro, Mass., or Osborne Coinage in Cincinnati. There the tokens will be melted down into a brass-nickel soup and reborn, maybe as a first-place medal, maybe a key chain or any of the other products offered by the two mints. Some tokens will end up in museums, like the Museum of New Hampshire History, or private coin collections.

One thing the state has no plans to do is buy back tokens, Boynton said. The six-month notice that tokens were on the way out, given by state officials earlier this year, gave motorists sufficient time to prepare, according to Boynton. The department has received a few complaints, he says, noting a recent story in Foster’s Daily Democrat about a Rochester man who purchased $400 worth of tokens last year to use for his daily commute. Once the state stops accepting tokens in a few months, he’ll be stuck with about $90 worth of unusable coins.

“I guess I would kind of question the wisdom of buying ($400) worth of tokens at the same time,” Boynton said.