Thanks, it's all such good information. The token cleaned up nice. I love thinking about how the past worked. She must have had some money to open a candy store and order tokens with her name on them.
Slot machines from Mills could be bought or leased and I would expect the cost of customised tokens would be amortised into the price. By all accounts, the machines were highly profitable for the operator, so it wouldn’t take too long for a machine to pay for itself.
The Mrs H.B. Sommer's business in Cripple Creek was reportedly a cigar stand and flower shop, not a candy store; the one in Salt Lake City sold ladies’ apparel. I would think it might be the same lady in both cases, but different timeframes.
Cripple Creek was a boom town in the years following the discovery of gold in 1890. In three years the population went from 500 to 10,000 people. By 1903/4 it was reported that the total being paid out in miners’ wages was over $650 thousand a month and that “This great sum is spent in the Cripple Creek District, and the merchants and other business men derive the benefit”. I guess “flowers for your sweetheart” might well have been a lucrative business and certainly cigars would have been. We don’t know what Mr Sommer did to earn a living, but there doesn’t seem to be a record of a business in his name so perhaps he was a miner?
I don’t know what the date is for the advert for Mrs H.B. Sommer's “Toggery Shop” in Salt Lake City, Utah posted by Jeff, but her other adverts seem to date from around 1912 and some refer to it as a “new shop”. If it’s the same Mrs Sommer then it presumably comes after her time in Cripple Creek c1904 running the cigar stand and flower shop.
Like many others, perhaps the Sommers left for pastures new sometime between the town beginning to decline following the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903-4 and its slow death when the mining operations finally closed in 1913.
