ERIC SCHENA INTERVIEW, PART FOUR

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V27 2024 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 27, Number 31, August 4, 2024, Article 14

Greg Bennick also interviewed exonumia researcher and collector Eric Schena. Here's the fourth part, where Eric talks about panic money, mintages of local tokens, and cherrypicking examples from antique shops. -Editor

GREG BENNICK: And we can. We'll do more. Let's talk about emergency money or panic money, because that's something that you've mentioned to me, that if you said to me, "Greg, tell me everything you know about emergency or panic money," I'd say, "I just did. I asked you the question. That's all I know." So, tell me and tell us about emergency money or panic money.

ERIC SCHENA: Well, panic money is interesting stuff. This is another form of making do. I don't know if you remember some years ago during the dot-com crisis around the time, 2008 or so, California ran out of money to pay their, they didn't run out of money, but they ran out of ways to pay their staff and they started handing out vouchers. That is technically panic money. Because we were in a panic and what was traditionally called a panic, but back then, the dot-com recession or whatever you want to call it… that was a form of panic scrip. The first, best known, it's kind of funny, these panics happen in usually in 25-year patterns. There was a panic in 1819, one in 1837, best known as the Hard Times, the panic of 1857, panic of 1873, another one in 1893, and then the big one, which was a panic in 1907.

And then after that, they became known as depressions in 1929, that period, the Great Depression. That's a panic. That was would be technically considered an economic panic on the same definition. A lot of panic scrip was issued because the money supply contracted so much so that people couldn't get their money or the banks were forced to be closed.

Roosevelt had very famously had the bank holiday just as soon as he took office in March of 1933. He closed the banks, mandatory bank holiday. There are people that need to get paid. And how did you pay them? How did these local businesses get paid? They came up with ersatz money. Many places went to the local newspaper shop, ordered up some scrip. Many communities did that too. Banks would gather together in clearinghouse associations and issue that kind of money and individual businesses… This coal scrip, this is actually a gold mining scrip. This is panic money.

This particular bank, I should say mine, the Gold Mountain Consolidated Mining Company, ran out of money to pay its miners. And had no way of getting that money from Richfield, Utah. So, they just quickly ran up some scrip and they paid it to their miners with due dates on it. Like, for instance, this one was payable on August 10th in 1908. This particular one right here. And so that's what they were. It was a form of circulating IOU. And a lot of this stuff was intended not to be saved. I mean, this is, this is not very decorative stuff. It's just words. It's purely utilitarian.

And many times, that was the case. In 1893, there was a monetary shortage in Virginia in particular. Around the tobacco fields. There was a bumper crop of tobacco. And there was of course, the banking contraction of 1893. And so, there was no money for the tobacco warehouses to buy product from the farmers. So, they issued a lot of the banking clearinghouses - Danville is the one that immediately comes to mind - issued their own scrip that would be payable later on. And it circulated as money. And they were not intended to be saved. And survival of this stuff is purely by chance because of that.

Those California vouchers from, you know, that's only about 15, 20 years ago. I've never seen one. They were not meant to; they were not meant to be saved. They were meant to be used and redeemed.

ERIC SCHENA: Exactly. Especially in this particular day and age where paper files are not as important to maintain, probably destroyed. I'm sure there's some of those vouchers still around. It was to California public employees, if I remember correctly. But I've never seen one. But that stuff exists and I find it eminently fascinating. And it's rare as hell too. If you think about it, how many 1909-S VDB pennies have you seen? They're expensive. They're popular, but you can always get one and you can always get one even up into MS-64, MS-65, MS-66.

GREG BENNICK: I didn't even know there was such a thing. Again, goosebumps for the first time in a Newman Numismatic Portal interview, because you mentioned that one even exists. Now I'm obsessing about it in my mind that I need to find one someday.

ERIC SCHENA: Yeah, they do. They do exist, but they're handfuls. They weren't struck in high quantity. If a store issued more than say 2000 or 3000 tokens, that was an average, if not a little higher than average. So, we're talking about minuscule amounts of these tokens. There's the Ingle Schierloh records. Ingle Schierloh was a, was a scrip manufacturer that was in business for quite a number of years in the first half of the 20th century. And their records still exist. They have minting records.

So, they will have entries in them saying the name of the customer, the location of the customer, the denominations that they wanted, the little cutouts that they wanted in the tokens and how many were struck by the die sinker, and by the mint. And there are records in there of 100 of one particular denomination or 200 to 300. We're not talking about large quantities of these things. And when you consider that they weren't meant to be saved, even fewer are around nowadays. So, a lot of that stuff only survives by happenstance.

GREG BENNICK: It's so interesting because it really reframes rarity, right? You know, there's some obviously classic American numismatic rarities of unparalleled order where there's one of, or that sort of thing. But then even the normal or average well-known classic numismatic rarities: the 1916 Standing Liberty quarter, or like you said, the 1909-S VDB cent. These are minted in the order of tens of thousands or a hundred thousand. But when we're talking about, for example, a counterstamp issued by a merchant, there might be 10 known or 15 or 20 known or what you're talking about, thousands made, 150 years ago of which how many remain? Hardly any.

ERIC SCHENA: Yeah, exactly. Here's a token from a place called Shooting Creek, Virginia. It's in Floyd County. One of only two known. This is rarer than an 1804 dollar. It's rarer than a 1913 V nickel. I didn't pay four and a half million dollars for it. (laughs)

GREG BENNICK: Well, that's what's interesting to me, right. Is that some of these more obscure for lack of a better term areas of numismatics or, you know, collecting, yield opportunities for people to acquire rarities on tall or high orders, which don't require vast bank accounts in order to purchase. Like chances of me owning a 1913 nickel? Pretty slim. Chance of me owning a token that of which there are five known? Pretty good. You know, there's a chance of that.

ERIC SCHENA: They are pretty good. And what's really funny is you can sometimes get them dirt cheap - those very rare tokens. My wife Heather has a fantastic eye for finding these things. She's from Southwest Virginia and she would go down and look in some of the antique stores and she would find all sorts of great tokens. She found this one token from a place called Mayberry. Now, that's a very familiar name to a lot of people and in fact it does have a connection to that tv show.

Mayberry is located in Patrick County Virginia. It is actually on the Blue Ridge Parkway and it's only about 20 or so miles away from Mount Airy, where Andy Griffith is from and he modeled Mayberry on the tv show off of Mount Airy. But he actually to the woman who played his girlfriend on the show - I can't remember her name to save my life and I feel bad about that. He actually told her that he would visit the general store in Mayberry Virginia with his grandfather and they had an account there and that's where he grabbed the name from, Mayberry in Patrick County Virginia. As far as I know that is a unique token on that denomination – it's one of two known. There's another from the merchant, but it's on a different denomination. Merchant's name was I.T. Banks, and it's unique. Heather paid 10 bucks for it.

GREG BENNICK: Incredible, I love it, I love it. It's just, it's always fascinated me and that's why one of the reasons I enjoy this so much. It is just exploring new areas that a people are interested in, but also remembering that we all like these obscure things, but that are actually quite meaningful. Meaning that what you just described isn't just some bizarre interesting fascinating weird collecting subset. It's, it's a piece of history that actually has a connection to Hollywood, to television, to popular culture all in the form of something that costs ten dollars that you can fit in the palm of your hand.

ERIC SCHENA: Yeah, it was ten dollars and it came out of an antique store in Vesta, Virginia, also in Patrick County.

ERIC SCHENA: Yeah, that's the kind of history that you go around and you try to preserve and here's the fun, actually not so much fun as it is important: the important thing is that finding these tokens is important. In some cases, if you have one or two known of those tokens, that's the only piece of evidence nowadays of that store. A lot of those stores, they were built in vernacular buildings that were not intended to last. Many times, they go through several ownership changes and the ownership changes get forgotten in the mists of history. A lot of times having those tokens is one of the few tangible items from that. This goes back to another numismatic aspect of mine. I also do ancient coins, ancient and medieval.

About the Interviewer
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.