Appalachian History Series – Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection: Kentucky Coal Camp Money in Metal
A thin brass or nickel token can look too small to carry much history, but in Appalachian coal country a five cent round could tell you where a miner worked, where his family shopped, and how much of local life remained under company control. The Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection at Morehead State University preserves 155 scrip tokens gathered over three decades from coal communities in Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Morehead’s manuscript record also shows the collection entered the university’s holdings in 1995 as MS022-1995, giving the archive itself a history that is now part of the story.
Reading Kentucky Through the Collection
Kentucky sits near the heart of the collection. Item records identify scrip from Harlan Wallins Coal Corporation at Verda, Wallins Creek Coal Company at Wallins, The Wilson-Berger Coal Company at Grays Knob, South East Coal Company at Seco, C. E. Flanary Store at Pee Vee, and Consolidation Coal Company at Jenkins. Taken together, those pieces trace a map of eastern Kentucky coal camps from the 1910s into the 1940s and show that scrip belonged not only to mines but also to stores, reorganized firms, and the broader web of company-town commerce.
The local detail in the records is what makes the collection so valuable. Morehead’s catalog includes a five cent Harlan Wallins piece from Verda dated 1940, Wallins Creek issues from 1915, a one dollar Wilson-Berger token from Grays Knob dated 1920, South East Coal Company pieces from Seco dated 1939, and a twenty five cent C. E. Flanary Store token that the archive explicitly ties to the Loony Creek Coal Corporation. Another 1940 composite record groups Bardo Coal Mining Company, Blue Diamond Coal Company, and Wallins Creek Coal Company together on a single page. Instead of treating scrip as a generic symbol of mining life, the collection restores the names of real camps and real business networks.
Other Kentucky public-history collections confirm that these were not isolated curiosities. The Kentucky Historical Society preserves six South East Coal Company tokens in values ranging from one cent to one dollar and also holds a five cent High Splint Coal Company token from Harlan County. ExploreKYHistory summarizes the practical meaning of such pieces plainly: coal workers used scrip tokens to buy goods at company stores. That matters because it anchors the Kilgore material in a wider body of state-level evidence rather than leaving it as a collector’s cabinet alone.
What Scrip Did
The tokens in the Arthur Kilgore collection were not simply novelty money. The National Park Service explains that scrip functioned as a substitute for hard money and was issued in paper form as coupons or in metal rounds called tokens, usually limited to the stores of the issuing company. Smithsonian interpretation makes the same point in museum language, describing coal scrip as a substitute for legal tender that could be issued either as wages or as credit against a miner’s next paycheck. Read that way, the Kilgore pieces are evidence of a local economy in which payroll, credit, and shopping were deliberately bound together.
That broader setting is essential to understanding why the collection matters for Appalachian history. The University of Kentucky’s Coal Camp Documentary Project describes eastern Kentucky coal camps as communities shaped by company control over housing, stores, and even the scrip currency used in daily life. UK Special Collections likewise notes that its Appalachian collections document the company towns, railroads, and industries that sustained coalfield counties such as Harlan, Floyd, Letcher, Perry, and Lawrence. Set beside those archives, the Kilgore tokens become more than objects. They become small but durable records of how company towns organized everyday life.
Law, Redemption, and the Fight Over Wages
Kentucky law shows that scrip stood at the center of a much larger struggle over wages and dependence. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 1917 bulletin on wage-payment legislation highlighted Kentucky’s constitutional requirement that wage earners in factories, mines, and workshops be paid in lawful money and cited Avent Beattyville Coal Co. v. Commonwealth as one of the key Kentucky decisions under that framework. In Avent, the Kentucky Court of Appeals dealt with an indictment for failing to pay a wage earner in lawful money, showing that the issue had already reached the courts by the 1890s, even if that particular conviction was reversed on the proof.
By 1916 the dispute had become even more concrete. In Pond Creek Coal Co. v. Riley Lester & Bros., the Kentucky Court of Appeals described coupon books issued through stores owned by the same interests as the coal company, marked payable in merchandise only, nontransferable, and redeemable only at the issuing store. Independent merchants nevertheless bought unused coupons from miners and demanded cash redemption, a sign that scrip often moved beyond the narrow channels companies tried to impose. In 1933, Hoskins Grocery Co. v. Creech Coal Co. from Harlan County showed the same pattern again when a local merchant sued to recover more than $1,100 in coal-company scrip and miners’ orders taken in trade.
These Kentucky cases belonged to a larger Appalachian and national legal story. In Knoxville Iron Co. v. Harbison, the United States Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s requirement that store orders, scrip, and similar evidences of indebtedness be redeemable in lawful money. In Keokee Consolidated Coke Co. v. Taylor, the Court likewise sustained Virginia’s law against orders redeemable only at employers’ shops, with Justice Holmes stating that legislatures could target an evil where experience showed it was most felt. Those rulings help explain why scrip survives in archives not as a quaint oddity but as evidence from one of the defining labor questions of industrial Appalachia.
A More Complicated Truth
The best scholarship also warns against flattening every coal-camp story into a single formula. Price V. Fishback argued that miners were generally not paid entirely in scrip and were not always trapped in permanent company-store debt. In many places, scrip worked as an advance between paydays while cash wages remained central. The National Park Service’s interpretation of scrip in the Big South Fork reaches a similar conclusion, noting that scrip often functioned as credit between paydays and that discounting by outside merchants became common when miners wanted cash or wider choice. That nuance makes the Arthur Kilgore collection more useful, not less. The tokens document a system that varied by place and time, but they still reveal how often daily survival ran through company channels.
Why the Arthur Kilgore Collection Matters
The Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection deserves to be read as one of the best object-based windows into coal camp Kentucky. A five cent Verda token, a Wallins issue, a Grays Knob dollar piece, a Seco round, or a Pee Vee store token each preserves the name of a place where wages, credit, law, and survival met. Morehead State’s digital archive gives those places back their physical evidence. For Appalachian history, that is the collection’s real power. It returns the company store, and the world built around it, to the palm of the hand.
Sources & Further Reading
Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection. Morehead State University, Special Collections and Archives. Accessed March 17, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kilgore_scrip_collection/
Salisbury, Maggie. Inventory/Finding Aid for the Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection, MS022-1995. Morehead State University Special Collections and Archives, November 24, 2014. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=manuscripts_fa&filename=0&type=additional
Harlan Wallins Coal Corporation. “Harlan Wallins Coal Corporation.” Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection, Morehead State University, 1940. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kilgore_scrip_collection/55/
Wallins Creek Coal Company. “Wallins Creek Coal Company.” Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection, Morehead State University, 1915. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kilgore_scrip_collection/151/
The Wilson-Berger Coal Company. “The Wilson-Berger Coal Company.” Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection, Morehead State University, 1930. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kilgore_scrip_collection/109/
C. E. Flanary Store. “C. E. Flanary Store.” Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection, Morehead State University, 1920. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kilgore_scrip_collection/29/
Southeast Coal Company. “Southeast Coal Company.” Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection, Morehead State University, 1939. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kilgore_scrip_collection/127/
Kentucky Historical Society. “Scrip.” Objects Catalog. Accessed March 17, 2026. https://kyhistory.pastperfectonline.com/webobject/0995FF79-9721-495F-AA12-077760199183
Kentucky Historical Society. “Token, store.” Objects Catalog. Accessed March 17, 2026. https://kyhistory.pastperfectonline.com/Webobject/4084FDC5-A04B-40E7-8B26-356102239610
Kentucky Historical Society. “Scrip.” ExploreKYHistory. Accessed March 17, 2026. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/files/show/928
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, Division of Mine Safety. “Annual Reports.” Accessed March 17, 2026. https://eec.ky.gov/Natural-Resources/Mining/Mine-Safety/safety-inspections-and-licensing/Pages/annual-reports.aspx
Kentucky. Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines, State of Kentucky. HathiTrust catalog record. Accessed March 17, 2026. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100565187
University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. “Coal Camp Documentary Project.” Accessed March 17, 2026. https://appalachianprojects.as.uky.edu/coal-camps
University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center. “Appalachian UK Special Collections.” Accessed March 17, 2026. https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/appalachian-uk-special-collections
Avent Beattyville Coal Co. v. Commonwealth, 96 Ky. 218, 28 S.W. 502 (Ky. Ct. App. 1894). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/avent-beattyville-coal-co-901791261
Pond Creek Coal Co. v. Riley Lester & Bros., 171 Ky. 811, 188 S.W. 907 (Ky. Ct. App. 1916). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/pond-creek-coal-co-901846765
Western Kentucky Coal Co. v. Nall & Bailey, 228 Ky. 76, 14 S.W.2d 400 (Ky. Ct. App. 1929). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/western-kentucky-coal-co-902120668
Hoskins Grocery Co. v. Creech Coal Co., 247 Ky. 8, 56 S.W.2d 555 (Ky. Ct. App. 1933). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/hoskins-grocery-co-v-901776886
Knoxville Iron Co. v. Harbison, 183 U.S. 13 (1901). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/183/13/
Keokee Consolidated Coke Co. v. Taylor, 234 U.S. 224 (1914). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/234/224/
Paterson, Robert G. Wage-Payment Legislation in the United States. Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, no. 229. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/wage-payment-legislation-united-states-3863
National Park Service. “Scrip—A Coal Miner’s Credit Card.” Last modified May 4, 2024. https://www.nps.gov/biso/learn/historyculture/scrip.htm
Fishback, Price V. “Did Coal Miners ‘Owe Their Souls to the Company Store’? Theory and Evidence from the Early 1900s.” Journal of Economic History 46, no. 4 (1986): 1011–1029. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2121820
Smithsonian National Museum of American History. “Coal Scrip Booklet.” Accessed March 17, 2026. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_872958
National Scrip Collectors Association. “About NSCA.” Accessed March 17, 2026. https://www.scripcollectors.org/about-nsca
Edkins, Donald O. Edkins Catalogue of United States Coal Company Store Scrip: Exclusive of West Virginia. Vol. 1. Olive Hill, KY: National Scrip Collectors Association, 1997. https://books.google.com/books/about/Edkins_Catalogue_of_United_States_Coal_C.html?id=CbZX0QEACAAJ
Author Note: As you read this piece, I hope you will see these tokens as more than collectibles or curiosities. They are small survivors of a larger coal camp world where wages, stores, work, and family life were bound tightly together.