Good Afternoon, I wanted to verify that canning tokens were paid to the workers for processing the product (example, peeling tomatoes) and not for picking the food that is to be canned. Thank you.
Google is your friend. All the above links and the following.. What are they? A: Merchant tokens were widely used on the eastern shore of Maryland (after the Civil War) by the canning industry, to pay laborers that picked or packed fruit, vegetables, oysters, crab, etc. https://www.mavericksattic.com/blogs/attic-anthologies/a-chat-with-douglas-wight-a-merchant-token-collector#:~:text=What are they?,, oysters, crab, etc.
Got to be a hard thing to verify, unless you are able to find written documentation of how the tokens were used to pay workers and which ones on a particular farm. It would also make a difference if the cannery owned the farm that grew the product. I think Wage Tokens were for the most part paid to migrant workers as a way to keep them on any particular farm until the harvest was over. I really don't think it had much to do with what job was being done. JMO Your question has a lot of variables to it.
