Welcome to the world of coal and lumber scrip! The National Scrip Collectors Association, Inc.(NSCA) is the only national organization of coin collectors focused exclusively on the coal and lumber tokens called scrip which were used throughout the United States. Our club is now more than forty years old.

Scrip, whether paper or metal, was, in general, a form of credit extended by an employer against the employees future earnings(not unlike a debit card), a form of currency intended for redemption only in the employer's company store, or commissary, for the purchase of food, clothing, tools and equipment, basically everything needed for daily life in the remote coal or lumber camps of the day. Various forms of scrip were used by virtually every industry in the nation over a broad period of America's industrial history, but in the coal and lumber industries, the practice extended primarily from the mid-19th Century until the mid-20th Century.

The NSCA began informally as a group of coin collectors in Central Appalachia who began meeting occasionally in the late 1960s to swap scrip, who, in 1972 formed our club, an organization later incorporated as a non-profit entity, Since the early 1970s we have been gathering each Spring and Fall for a membership meeting to renew old friendships, and to swap tokens and related historical memoribalia .Between meetings, the NSCA publishes its long-running newsletter, "Scrip Talk", chock-full of informative articles on scrip, the differing companies which issued it, those who made the dies and manufactured the tokens, etc.

Since 1972 the NSCA has also published numerous authoritative books written by our members which catalog all that's known about the tokens which are the focus of our hobby, books which have been re-vised and re-printed over the years.