I found these photos on sales at eBay. I thought I would share the pictures with you.
I received the following E-mails about the tokens:
"Several months ago, I ran across those old tokens on the Bradley County
web site and didn't know anything about the Hamilton Company but they looked neat
and interesting to me. I am a coin collector. But just this past week I was at the
Bradley County Library here in town and was reading a book on early timber industry
in Arkansas; in fact two books. One dealt with the Ouachita National Forest area
near Texas and Oklahoma and the other dealt with forests in the gulf coastal plain
(which included Warren).
In one of those books I ran across pictures of tokens that looked almost
exactly like the ones you have displayed on the website, except that they had
another company's name instead of Hamilton and instead of Warren they had another
Arkansas town. There was a little name they called the tokens but I didn't write it
down (I can go back to the library and look, though, if you are interersted in the
name of the book, etc). Thinking back, I believe they called them Brozins, evidently
made of bronze, but one place they called them Bozins without the "r." They said that
the lumber company would issue the tokens at the end of each day whereas payday was
only about once or so a month. You could spend the tokens at the Company Store
or Commissary as soon as you received them at face value. You could spend them
elsewhere but you were docked 10 percent at almost all other stores. For those
better off financially, you could retain those tokens from each day's wages and
turn them back in to the paymaster on payday each month and you could get cold
hard cash that would spend at the Company Store or anywhere else without the 10
percent discounting. Interesting reading and although I am only 57 years old I
can remember when it was customary to pay farm workers at the end of each day.
Public jobs at that time had already adjusted to a weekly payday. But now I would
like to know who the Hamilton Company was. I did not see that name associated with
any of the early Warrren, AR. lumber industry. Floyd Brown, March 2004"
"John N. Hamilton was my great grandfather. He was a farmer but he also
owned a store. The tokens were probably used in the 1880-1895 time frame. He died
Nov. 4, 1895. Jack Scobey, August 2005"
I also found this note from Jann Woodard in the ARBRADLE list archives.
Subject: Re: [ARBRADLE] trade tokens, Hamilton Company of Warren
Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2002
John Hamilton was a businessman in Warren in the late 1800's and early 1900's.
He also owned the commissary at one of the old mills in Warren. He was connected
to the Cathey and Scobey families. Seems his business was one of the ones that
suffered complete loss by a big fire in Warren."
NEW!!! Check these out! Other Trade Tokens from Warren, Arkansas
If you know anything more about The Hamilton Company, please e-mail me, Barbara Logan.
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