spcfarr - this'll save you the trouble. Your token is listed in Aqua's Pennsylvania Merchant Tokens book under New Kensington, PA. There is a whole series of 18 token varieties from the Independent Brewing Co. of New Kensington, and 17 of them are shown as "rarity 6" which translates to 3 to 8 examples known. There is one listed as "rarity 7" or 1 to 2 examples known. Each of the listed ones has some set of initials - yours with the "W. S." has the note, "tentative attribution: William Straub Hotel, circa 1905-1912".
The Independent Brewing Co. was headquartered in Pittsburgh. The company built a brewery at New Kensington, the home of one of its founders and largest stockholders, Thomas P. Kajut.
When bottled beer was relatively new on the market, bottles were often scarce and the breweries wanted them back to clean, refill, and resell. Their solution was when a customer bought bottles of beer, they were charged a 5¢ deposit for each bottle. Since the brewery didn't want random bottles to be returned, they gave one of these tokens with each bottle, and required whoever returned the bottle to return the token with it to claim their nickel.
Apparently the company had some sort of deal with their retailers in the New Kensington and those arrangements resulted in the numerous token varieties with the initials on the tokens. It might be that the empties were to be returned at the brewery rather than at the retail locations and these initials would allow them to sort out which retailer had collected which deposit nickels.
The Independent Brewing Co. listing under Pittsburgh in Aqua's book shows almost three pages of similar varieties. Each of the Pittsburg ones also has "Duquesne" on it - I think I heard once that this was their brand, Duquesne Beer.
As far as value, PA tokens are not that popular, so values in general are relatively low. The fact that your token is from a brewery opens up a whole new bunch of collectors, those interested in breweriana, in addition to PA token collectors. I'd estimate $5 to $10 for this one.
Finally, would you be interested in posting the pics of your token to
TokenCatalog.com for the good of the hobby? With your permission to use your pics, I could do it if you don't want to do the posting.
John in the Great 208
