THE WHIMSICAL TOKENS OF NORTHERN KENTUCKY

 

When I was a kid visiting coin shops and flea markets in the 1970s, a reliable giveaway or junkbox item was often an odd-shaped aluminum or brass trade token from northern Kentucky. From the early good-fors of the late 1800s up until the early 1960s, many businesses in the communities situated across the Ohio River from Cincinnati took an imaginative eye to their promotional pieces and dispensed a wealth of interesting coinage substitutes. Newport, Kentucky, in Campbell County, is easily accessed from Cincinnati by a suspension bridge built in 1866, designed by John A. Roebling—still in use today as is his more famous (and visually similar) Brooklyn Bridge. Newport was an Army town, home to the Newport Barracks—in the period after the American Civil War incorporating into Fort Thomas—a defense point overlooking Cincinnati. (But more on Newport later in the article.) Just to the west in neighboring Kenton County is the city of Covington, long a proud German-American settlement and even now a Germanic cultural enclave.

While these two cities make up the bulk of the issuing stores, saloons, restaurants, and gas stations, there were also nearby towns such as Erlanger, Dayton, Bellevue, Bromley, and others who joined in the fun of advertising their wares in the forms of shields, artist palettes, horse heads, police badges, whiskey barrels, fish, and many other forms—even boxing gloves! It is a unique regional specialty to collect, and the tokens are instantly recognizable, even from a distance, as being from the area. A marked advantage for the vendors who ordered these tokens was the proximity to the manufacturing dynamo of Cincinnati: Greg G. Wright & Sons, James Murdock, and the Osborne Register Co. all contributed to the mix of interesting token designs and shapes, but perhaps the most creative of all came locally from the National Band and Tag Company of Newport. Still very much active at 119 years young, the company produces in addition to promotional pieces such necessities as poultry leg bands; tags for livestock, cats. and dogs; and all manner of industrial and commercial tags. As Prohibition lifted in 1933 and the Great Depression waned, National Band and Tag was uniquely situated to provide a cheerful diversion to generations of their customers and neighbors.

To read the complete article, see:
From the Colonel's Desk: The whimsical tokens of northern Kentucky—and the story of Sin City (http://news.coinupdate.com/from-the-colonels-desk-the-whimsical-tokens-of-northern-kentucky-and-the-story-of-sin-city/)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web