West Virginia Merchant Tokens

In 1863 West Virginia was admitted to the Union as the 35th state, and during that year a few merchants issued Civil War tokens to alleviate the shortage of small change.  After the war there was little numismatic activity in West Virginia until the 1870s, when a small number of merchants and mining companies started using trade tokens.  By the turn of the century this number had dramatically increased.

Many types of merchants found reason to use tokens in West Virginia.  General merchandise stores often issued them in the same denominations as official United States coins.  In saloons and other establishments where alcoholic beverages were sold, they were handy for making change or for partial payment of drinks.  Bakeries, billiard parlors, dairies, drug stores, clothing stores, and hotels, were among the numerous types of business establishments that profited from the usage of tokens.  Most had some sort of value, expressed either as a monetary denomination or some specific "good for."

For the most part, merchant tokens were issued in small quantities.  A mintage of a thousand pieces might be considerably large, and in some instances as few as a hundred pieces of a token were struck.  So, it is easy to see why so many of the tokens cataloged in this book are rare, in many cases only a single example being known to exist.

This book catalogs all those merchant trade tokens known to the author which were in use from the end of the Civil War to the early 1960s.  It does not include coal mine company store tokens, as they are cataloged elsewhere.  Transportation tokens are not listed for the same reason, as are Civil War store cards.  Items such as car wash tokens, parking tokens, wooden nickels, and food stamp tokens are excluded, since most of them are of fairly recent issue.  No plastic tokens are listed, as they are also modern.  Encased cents which have a "good for" value expressed in their inscriptions are included; those which are strictly advertising in nature are not.

Binding: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Publication Date: 2009
Size: 8.5x11
Pages: 502