Terry--nice finds! The Ingle company, based in Dayton, OH, produced tokens as part of their "Ingle System" of bookkeeping for grocery and other types of stores. They marketed their "system" over much of the USA, but generally more tokens are known the closer you get to their headquarters. Grocery and general stores usually did two things that complicated their bookkeeping, and the Ingle System aimed to address each. First, stores often bought "butter & eggs" and other produce. The store could either pay cash or give store credit, and the stores usually gave a little more when paid in store credit than in cash - maybe 10% or so. The thought was that the farmer could easily take the cash to the competing store and spend it there, but store credit would insure return business. The second thing was that these stores often loaned money to their customers to help them out until payday or until the crops came in. Again, store credit was the easiest and most profitable to the store.
So, the Ingle Company made tokens for the stores, imprinted with the store name, in denominations from 1¢ to $10 or $20, and sold them along with accounting forms, etc. to stores. The stores could then purchase stuff with tokens and/or loan credits in the form of tokens. The tokens were only good at the store named on the token (although they did circulate to a small extent within the community since the barber needed groceries too). Every token lost or otherwise not redeemed was nearly pure profit to the store, and they got the benefit of the return business from their customers.
There are two basic series of Ingle tokens - 1909 and 1914-dated ones - but they were marketed for years after 1914. The problem that most Ingle tokens present today is that the location of the store is seldom shown on the tokens. That makes for a large research project to determine where "Dunn & Farmer" and thousands like them, were from. The late Lloyd Wagaman from Indiana spent countless hours poring over old business directories - he ultimately produced a 80 page booklet identifying many. Subsequently, researchers were able to obtain copies of a ledger the Ingle company used to track their shipments of tokens and other System supplies. It did a lot to correct errors in Wagaman's book, but there are still a lot of tokens where the business' location has yet to be proven.
Your finds fall in this latter category, but your having found two of them where you did will be a good help in researching them. I have contacted the current expert on Ingles to see if he has any info that will help. I'll post what he says. In the meantime, it would be great if you would post good closeups of each one on
Richard's Token Database - TokenCatalog.com, or send them to me and I can do it.
Value
That remains to be seen - a token attributed to a specific location is generally worth more than one that isn't. There are collectors of specific states who, for instance, would give a lot for a TN token but not for a KY token even though the TN token might be from right by the TN-KY state line.
John in the Great 208
