HISTORICAL COMMENT BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER 9-7-13

A NEW CANNING HOUSE TOKEN SURFACES

I have collected canning house tokens for many years and the thrill of putting a new token in my collection never lessens. The tokens were used from the 1860’s to about 1950, with tokens from the Eastern Shore starting to show up around 1875. They were used to pay the workers in the canneries and oysters houses for manual labor and were redeemed for cash either at the end of the day or week. Before the child labor laws, children might work all summer, saving their tokens to cash in for their back-to-school clothes (usually shoes – the clothes were hand made at home). Tokens have also been found that were used to pay the pickers in the fields.

Throughout the years of token collecting, I have acquired many tokens through various means. Swapping with fellow collectors has been the most rewarding. In the old days, doubles were the bounty of any other collector that didn’t have them as long as they had doubles that from which could freely select. The long-gone early collectors that swapped this way are only a memory now that everything has a price attached to it. I still give away my doubles to new collectors that show signs of being in the hobby for the love of it rather than any monetary gain. By doing this, I have cultivated some new collectors here on the Shore, and made some new friends.

As a local historian, the knowledge of tokens is a nice addition to the knowledge found in the local history books. This brings me to tell of the latest token to surface. A local dealer called to tell me of three tokens he bought from a man and wanted to know what they were. They were thick red fiber, 24 mm, and had only the initials WFM incused on them. There weren’t any periods after the initials. The main clue he had was from the man he bought them from. The man said they had belonged to his mother. She worked in the office of the W. F. Messick Ice Co. in Salisbury. There is a W. F. Messick & Bro., Allen, MD, listed in R. Lee Burton’s book, Canneries of the Eastern Shore. It is Wicomico No. 57 and was in business at least from 1919-1922. Further research in Ed Kee’s book, Saving Our Harvest, revealed that W. F. Messick & Bro. is listed in the 1919 Canners Directory. The important piece of research that came out of Ed Kee’s book was the fact that the Messick cannery’s office was in Salisbury, the place of the W. F. Messick Ice Co. I imagine that W. F. Messick kept the books for the cannery at his ice company office in Salisbury.

So, with some solid research to back up my claim that the WFM token is from the Messick cannery in Allen, MD, I have added a new token to my Wicomico Countycollection.

This is a token that would have been a Maverick at a flea market if the information had not been available to go along with it. As it is, a good token with good attribution has been added to the list of known tokens. As I’ve always said about token collecting – a good hobby is one that you spend more time than money in accumulating your collection.