William Oscar Strome was born 27 September, 1871, son of Jacob Strome and his wife Barbara Shaffer Strome. He started out as a salesman in a hardware store in his hometown of New Carlisle, OH. He married a Virginia girl named Sadie Judd in about 1900 and by 1910 they had six little Stromes, 4 sons and 2 daughters. He had gone into the grocery business for himself sometime prior to 1910, and in 1912 the Bradstreet Directory (predecessor to Dun & Bradstreet) showed him in the general store business. A third daughter came along in 1913, but sometime between then and 1920, Sadie died and he remarried. In the late 'teens, a lot of general stores and grocery stores (they were mostly all a combination), fell on hard times when agricultural prices bottomed out. Farmers went broke and shortly thereafter the stores that had been extending credit to the farmers went under as well. William got a job as a laborer in a automotive garage. He died 17 February 1956 in New Carlisle.
The value of Ingle tokens varies all over the map. They are of two major varieties, 1909 and 1914 patent dates. Nearly all of them are mavericks, that is they don't name the town they are from. The good news, however, is that they have been well researched and there is information on the 1914 ones as to where they were shipped when they were made. That allows us to have attributions on a high percentage of Ingles.
The Strome tokens are listed in both Gaylor Lipscomb's OH Merchant Tokens book and Lloyd Wagaman's Ingle Tokens book. Neither of these books gives valuations - if they did, the values would be outdated by now. I'd estimate you could get in the $10 range for this token, but not being too close to the Ohio token market, I could be off some.
John in ID
