![\"20070914_penny_souvenir.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.accessniagara.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/20070914_penny_souvenir.jpg?w=640\")
<\/p>\nI traditional souvenir for travelers is a squished\/smashed\/elongated\/pressed penny. I’m sure you’ve seen those machines where you put in a buck or two and a penny and the penny will be stretched and imprinted with a design. These days you generally don’t put pennies in (I think it is against the law to deface currency\/coin), but there are usually copper tokens the size of pennies already in the machine.<\/p>\n
I recently found on of these on the ground.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’m not positive where it came from, but based on the image, it must have been a Niagara Parks location, and was most likely near Table Rock as the picture looks like the Journey Behind the Falls.<\/p>\n
I did some brief searching for more information about this sort of collecting, and it is actually quite popular. The following are two sites of interest:<\/p>\n
Squished Penny Museum<\/a> – This site, although no longer updated, it has information on the history of squished pennies, along with stories from the owner’s travels.<\/p>\n
PennyCollector.com<\/a> – This site has a great listing of places around the world you can get these squished pennies. The Canada page<\/a> shows that there are 15 places in Niagara Falls where you can get these. I’ve seen the machines at several of the locations mentioned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I traditional souvenir for travelers is a squished\/smashed\/elongated\/pressed penny. I’m sure you’ve seen those machines where you put in a buck or two and a penny and the penny will be stretched and imprinted with a design. These days you generally don’t put pennies in (I think it is against the law to deface currency\/coin),…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/accessniagara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/accessniagara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/accessniagara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/accessniagara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/accessniagara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/accessniagara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/accessniagara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/accessniagara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/accessniagara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}