clothing tag?

[rocky raccoon]

you tell me? on 1 side big #5 on the other j g townsend

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

DR.ÖTEK Metal Detector, Waterproof Gold Detector, Pinpoint & Terrain Modes, Professional Metal Detector - Grab it through Amazon!

[idahotokens]

This is a "piecework token" from Georgetown, Delaware. Listed in Miller's 1988 Delaware Merchant Tokens as #340-T5-5. Miller says J. G. Townsend Jr. & Co. was first listed in 1915 as a vegetable cannery with its office in Shelbyville. They had factories (canneries( there and at Georgetown. In 1918 the office was moved to Georgetown. The factory at Shelbyville closed in 1939, the year the factory stopped canning tomatoes. Today the factory processes frozen peas and lima beans. The founder, J. G. Townsend was governor of Delaware from 1917-1924, and U. S. Senator from the state from 1929 to 1941.

In this case, the token was used in the following manner. In the cannery, workers were paid by the unit - here the unit was probably a certain size of bucket of tomatoes. When the bucket was processed (this was hand work at the time), the worker would be given a token of "1" denomination and the next bucket to work on. I suppose the "5" and "10" denominations also known were used to consolidate the pay so there weren't so many "1" tokens to keep track of. At the end of the day or shift, the worker would take all of the tokens s/he had accumulated to the paymaster and the amount multiplied by the going rate for that kind of work, and the worker would receive that amount of credit on their pay record. Every week (or whatever the pay period) the worker would get a paycheck.

This allowed for fairly easy accounting for the company - the pay rate could change for different vegetables and as times changed. Plus, in this "clean" environment, nobody had to handle coins. The company also profited by every token that was not redeemed.

John in the 208