United States Merchant Tokens

Nalaberong has worked hard on the Canadian Municipal Dollars and the work had benefited me greatly. My catalog looks nice when I scroll through my collection and it has also helped me from buying duplicates, as I can access it from my phone. What I consider the most important contribution though is the local history he has added in the comments (e.g. https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces67890.html ). As a non-Canadian, I am not as familiar with the towns, provinces and events behind the tokens, and the notes help be place the items in context.

His hard work has inspired me to begin working on my collection of United States Merchant Tokens from the Western United States. These tokens are also known as "Good For's" and "Trade tokens", as most of them have "Good for X in Trade" on the reverse. These tokens circulated under similar circumstances as Condor tokens, notgeld and other emergency coinage; namely coin shortages due to depressions, wars and the fact that the West was remote and had long supply lines.

Since these pieces actually circulated I feel like they have a lot of numismatic importance, even if they are less well known than their official coin counterparts. The mintages for these items are usually pretty low. Most of the estimates that I have read give mintage numbers of less than 1000 for even large orders. It is not that uncommon for a mintage to be less than 100 for a smaller town.

The format I have been using is:

City, State - Business Name - Value of Token

Some examples:
New Plymouth, Idaho - H.I. Chadwick - 5 Cents In Trade
Bakersfield, California - Fruitvale Dairy - 1 Quart Milk

If the name is abbreviated on the token I expand it for the title. (Since the abbreviated title will be in the transcribed text).

For the currency I am doing *Tokens* - United States - Merchandise Tokens

I've been added small maps and a short history of the town for each token I am adding. I think this is important for people who do not live in the United States, to give them a sense of the history and so they know where the town is located. If you are not familiar with the nation it can be difficult to know where a town is located, and the map clears that up. As an American I know that Oregon is sometimes abbreviated as Ore. or OR, but I imagine it must be difficult for a non-American, as I have had the same experiences trying to figure out a town or business with French and German tokens.

Some examples:

https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces75924.html
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces76339.html

Anyway, keep everything clean that you add so it doesn't get deleted.

I found a really good site for US merchant tokens a while ago, I'll see if I can find it again.

Here we go, this has a pretty good catalogue of them

http://tokencatalog.com/