By Vivian B. Blevins, Ph.D.
Piqua, Ohio, vbblevins@woh.rr.com
Steve Cawood, an attorney from Pineville, describes the conditions “up Cloverfork” in Harlan County when coal mines began providing jobs at the turn of the 20th century up to 1920.
As he relates it, most miners had families, but it was rare for them to own automobiles in that part of the county. There were no roads in rural areas, and passenger trains served the mining camps. Railroads were essential as a way to transport the mined coal to markets. There were few banks, and they were at a great distance. There were none “up Cloverfork” in Harlan County. Miners could not get loans and had no money to deposit in banks if they could manage to get to Harlan, the county seat. Mining companies often provided modest housing, and scrip became the currency for transactions at commissaries—company stores that sold everything from food and clothing to carbide lamps.
Scrip was a line of credit against wages the miner intended to earn. In the lyrics of the song “Sixteen Tons,” Merle Travis, who was knowledgeable about coal mining from his early years in Muhlenberg County, writes that the narrator in the song has a weak mind and “a back that’s strong” as he laments his work in the mines and his never-ending indebtedness to the company store.
Cawood says that each mining company had its own scrip of various denominations. The value of the coins today depends upon beauty and rarity. Pictorial scrip featuring locomotives, nature or American Indians is highly desirable. Additionally, dates on scrip enhance value.
A 1968 graduate of the University of Kentucky, Cawood is a past president of the National Scrip Collectors Association. He first became interested in scrip when he was a young boy and traveled with his uncle, Al Smith, head salesman at McComb Supply, to mines and commissaries. “While my uncle sold to the bosses, I bummed small tokens of scrip from the scrip clerks or swapped U.S. currency for a piece of scrip,” he says.
His mother worked briefly in the 1930s as a scrip clerk at the Kentucky Cardinal Coal Company, and he was fascinated with the scrip of that company: bright brass with cardinals. Cawood also saw the satisfaction his mother received in building collections of United States coins in coin collectors books she bought at dime stores. In the 1950s, she gave Cawood a cigar box of scrip from the company where she had worked.
The scrip machines (Osborne Register Company and Ingle-Schierloh Company), which Cawood’s mother and other scrip clerks used to conduct business with cardboard punch cards, were custom made for those Cincinnati-area companies by the National Cash Register Company of Dayton, Ohio.
As Cawood’s legal practice flourished, the claimants with whom he worked, many with black lung and workers’ compensation cases, gave him scrip, as they knew he valued and collected it.
Cawood’s scrip is stored in a bank vault. “It’s the first metal coal scrip issued in America, and it’s from The Pine Hill Coal Company in Rockcastle County,” he says of his most valuable scrip. “It is brass, and I have five pieces. One piece is dated 1871, and another is dated 1875. The engraver was J.F. Dorman of Baltimore, and pieces of the scrip feature a seated Lady Liberty, an eagle and a Liberty head. The company mined coal for locomotives, so that the L&N Railroad could complete its route from Cincinnati to Corbin. That coal company was short-lived, and the scrip is valued at approximately $500 a token.”
Then there is the scrip Cawood owns to which he is most emotionally attached. “That scrip is directly tied to my family,” he says. “My paternal grandfather, Steve Cawood, opened the first mine on Martin’s Fork in 1914, the Lena Rue Coal Company [in operation from 1914 to the late 1920s], named in honor of his sister. He died of a stroke when my dad was 11, so I never knew him. After his death, the company was sold to Southern Coal and Coke of Knoxville, Tennessee.”
Current or former older homes in coal-mining areas in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia or Kentucky might still be sources of pieces of scrip, often placed in drawers of sewing machines, old cigar boxes, or kitchen cabinets.
Edkins Catalogue of Coal Mining Scrip, Fourth Edition, provides some information about the source of scrip as a starting point for further research. (West Virginia had so many mining companies that it has its own volume, Vol. 2). These hefty books are part of special collections, but librarians often will send a few pages via email to interested parties who must supply the name of the state and the name of the town. Both are generally embossed on the scrip.
A version of this story first appeared in the Greenville, Ohio, Daily Advocate & Early Bird News.
About the Author
A past president of Southeast Kentucky Community College in Cumberland, Kentucky, Dr. Vivian Blevins spent her childhood in Cumberland. Her father worked for the coal mines at United States Steel in Lynch until mechanization forced him to relocate the family to Toledo, Ohio. Blevins is proud to say that she has been president or chancellor of colleges, as Janis Joplin sang, “from the Kentucky coal mines to the California sun.”