Trade token, Benette Branch Elk County PA, ideas?

[Timbersnort]

Looking for help identifying tag token. Says ENZIE & MCMULLEN, SCOTCH HOUSE, W..(cant make out letters) SHAWLS. Detected Benett Branch valley Elk-Cameron Counties.

Think this maybe a scotch bottle tag, not sure age. Learned Enzie was a rural distillery near the harbour village of Portgordon Scotland – then Banffshire, now Moray – from 1827 to 1833.

 

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[Professor of Engineering]

Cool token, congrats!

 

[Digger RJ]

Nice!!! Congrats!!!

 

[Red-Coat]

That’s a long way from home!

‘Scotch House’ has nothing to do with whisky. The trader is Mackenzie & McMullen (partly obscured by the pierced hole) and the Scotch House was their trading name as a draper, selling ‘cheap silks and shawls’. Their warehouse was at 36 High Street in Belfast, Ireland (now Northern Ireland).

It’s a mid 19th Century unofficial ‘farthing’ token, circa 1856 for which there were numerous die variations, some of which are shown below (from Barry Woodside’s ‘Irish Tokens of the 19 & 20th C’ website):

 

[Timbersnort]

That’s a long way from home!

‘Scotch House’ has nothing to do with whisky. The trader is Mackenzie & McMullen (partly obscured by the pierced hole) and the Scotch House was their trading name as a draper, selling ‘cheap silks and shawls’. Their warehouse was at 36 High Street in Belfast, Ireland (now Northern Ireland).

It’s a mid 19th Century unofficial ‘farthing’ token, circa 1856 for which there were numerous die variations, some of which are shown below (from Barry Woodside’s ‘Irish Tokens of the 19 & 20th C’ website):

View attachment 1817920

Thank you for the details, there was a logging/sawmill town with a hotel nearby that was active in mid 1800s.

 

[pa plateau hiker]

Thank you for the details, there was a logging/sawmill town with a hotel nearby that was active in mid 1800s.

All that's there now is tame elk.

 

[Timbersnort]

All that's there now is tame elk.

PGC says the hunts are making the elk wild, not sure what their definition of wild is.

A token dealer sent me a note stating these tokens were needed by traders who dealt with the poor, during this period there was a severe lack of small change circulating, in fact, between late 1852 and summer 1853, the Royal Mint sold no copper coinage at all. The Mint blamed the shortage on people exporting coinage for use in the colonies.

 

[Red-Coat]

PGC says the hunts are making the elk wild, not sure what their definition of wild is.

A token dealer sent me a note stating these tokens were needed by traders who dealt with the poor, during this period there was a severe lack of small change circulating, in fact, between late 1852 and summer 1853, the Royal Mint sold no copper coinage at all. The Mint blamed the shortage on people exporting coinage for use in the colonies.

It’s not quite as simple as that. Britain had a long history of small change shortages going all the way back to the early 1700s when silver was in short supply and we began the transition to the copper penny. Even after copper currency appeared, every time we went to war (something we did a lot in those times) the price of copper went up because it was in high demand for cannon barrel production and it was uneconomical to use it for producing coinage.

Through to the 1800s, shortages were exacerbated by people melting down existing copper coinage whenever the copper price rose, because the metal was worth more than the coins. There was a big price rise as a result of the war of 1812 and at the time this token was produced the effects of the Crimean War (1853-1856) were still being felt. Nevertheless the Royal Mint produced 1,935,360 farthings in 1851; 822,528 in 1852; 1,028,628 in 1853; and 6,504,960 in 1854.

The trouble is, they were filling an almost empty pot against the backdrop that demand was hugely increasing as the Industrial Revolution made its mark on societal needs. The empty pot was from a combination of earlier low or nil mintages, coins being (illegally) melted down, colonial export and everyday loss or wear and tear. By the late 1700s the vast majority of copper coinage remaining in circulation was a mixture of old coins worn so flat that they were unrecognisable, counterfeits, and unofficial tokens. Both the general public and the authorities adopted a pragmatic approach. Almost anything that was approximately the right size/shape/colour was commonly accepted as everyday currency and a blind eye was turned to unofficial issues. You couldn’t pay your taxes in copper coinage of any kind though.

After the “Great Re-Coinage of 1816” things were supposed to have improved but this largely addressed the re-stabilisation of our currency after the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), not the actual shortage of low-denomination coins. Ireland (where this farthing token comes from) had its own problems. In 1826, separate issues for Ireland were withdrawn and replaced by British issues as a result of the Irish penny being re-valued at 12/13 of its British counterpart. Again, this was a ‘filling an empty pot’ situation as far as the Royal Mint was concerned.

By 1802, the production of privately issued provincial tokens had largely ceased but resurged again in 1812 (the ‘war effect’) and was made illegal in 1816 after the war ended, with severe penalties. It was still possible to pay workers with company-issued tokens until that was also outlawed for most trades by the ‘Truck Act 1831’ and then for all trades by an 1887 amendment.

Trader tokens issued thereafter (ie post-1831) did not enjoy the ‘blind eye’ tolerance accorded to earlier issues and those that were produced almost invariably carried the trader’s name, address and reference to his business interests such that they might rely on a defence that they were solely advertising pieces and not currency. They’re almost invariably farthing-sized in the belief that higher values would attract unwelcome attention from the authorities, but carry no indication of that value to further de-risk them.

Incidentally, during the early settlement of Elk County there was a petition to create a new township which was granted under the name “Sinnemahoning” in 1821. The settlers hated the name and petitioned to change it to “Fox Township”, in honour of Samuel M. Fox. This was a small conglomerate of hamlets and villages of which one came to be known as “Irishtown” as a result of large numbers of Irish immigrants arriving from the 1830s onwards. Quite likely there’s a connection between that and an Irish token from the 1850s I would have thought.

 

[EdHartzel]

Awesome find and ID thread. Congratulations!

 

[washingtonian]

Very cool find. Thanks for sharing!!

 

[Mudflap]

Sinnemahoning. Home of the great rattlesnake rodeo.

 

[A2coins]

Excellent ID and info Redcoat thats a nice find I love stuff like that Good job