Good Morning! I'm trying to find any information (trust me, ANYTHING) on this token that my grandmother gave me. Her family owned a store in Pinckneyville, Illinois, and this is the only token from there (that I know of) that we have. Is there a book that lists this? I've taken it to dealers, coin shows, and tried looking it up on the Internet. And now I ask for guidance from the many wise sages of CoinTalk Forum. Thanks, ~benjamin
I had a few minutes and thought I could dig something up for you. I have three different Illinois exonumia references, but none of them list your token. In fact, none of them even list Pinckneyville as having any tokens issued from there. Ore H. Vacketta was the Illinois token expert, but he passed away a couple of years ago. Rich Hartzog was the broker for Vacketta's collection of over 11,000 different Illinois trade tokens. Rich is well known in exonumia circles, and it is possible that he may be able to shed some light on your token. If you can not find his contact info on the net, let me know and I will PM it to you. Hartzog indicated in the ad for Vacketta's collection that "some rarer towns have been bringing $100-250+." I would certainly think that your token would fall into that category. I did not have time yet to check my listing of over 60,000 maverick tokens, so there is still a (small) chance that I may find something. If you would have any evidence to back up/verify to a collector that the token is from Pinckneyville (such as a business directory, old advertisements, stationary, etc.), your token would be very desirable to an Illinois token collector. I will let you know if I find anything in the maverick listings.
For the few tokens I have, I've had some luck with www.ancestry.com. You can go there and type in the names on the tokens and hopefully get some placenames, etc. Then each county has a web site that sometimes has old business directories, etc. like cwtoken is talking about. It's a bit of work and could lead nowhere, but at least it's something to try. Just for the HEY of it, I went there and entered Caveglia in. I got a lot of Illinois locations like Bureau, IL and Lebannon, IL. Something you could try.....
I just wanted to say that I didn't forget about checking on this token. Taxes took wayyyyyy more time than I thought, and now I'll be in Mexico thru the rest of this month. I spent a bit of time, but am having some trouble locating my maverick token reference.
Thanks! Sorry, I had some issues finding this post again after taking a break from coins to sort out some work issues. I actually spoke with Mr. Herzog on the phone once, as he was recommended to me by a coin dealer, and he had never heard of this particular token. I've showed it around a few coin shows, and always people shrug their shoulders... Ancestry.com provided no assistance, but thanks for the suggestion! In any case, thanks for the info...I appreciate it! ~benjamin
