Abstract

 A new field of coin collecting emerged from the publication of Alvin Rust’s Mormon and Utah Coins and Currency in 1984. This landmark work opened the eyes of collectors worldwide to the world of Mormon money, and in so doing created hundreds of new collectors in several different collecting fields. One of those fields is the pioneer minor coinage of Utah, sometimes called tokens. In his work, Rust identified a specific group of pioneer minor coins known as “co-ops”, and stated that the class, as a whole, was Mormon. The majority of this minor coinage was made and used during the approximate 1890 to 1935 period. Since the publication of Rust’s book collectors have assumed a variety of things: a) all co-ops were Mormon Church owned; b) no other Utah tokens are Mormon Church related; c) mercantile tokens were non-Mormon businesses generally in competition with Mormon co-ops. Assumptions were made based on insufficient research applied to the collecting field as a whole. It has been discovered that this jump to conclusion by collectors is gravely in error, and that the collecting field of Mormon money is far more complicated, and thus immensely more interesting and important, than first envisioned. Important new research shows that few, if any, Utah co-ops that produced tokens are Mormon Church owned. Even the ZCMI tokens were not the product of a Church owned company. The Mormon Church was required to divest itself of majority ownership about 1890, and did not reacquire majority ownership of 51% until sometime later in the twentieth century. The development of the co-op system stores paralleled and was identical to the development of mercantile stores in Utah. In many cases, the names were synonymous. Both entities were commonly owned by Mormon Church members, particularly in communities settled by Mormon colonies. Both systems evolved in Western Europe. The Co-op system consisted of community owned stores with one vote per share owned. The Mercantile system was one vote per person or shareholder. Utah token expert Lee Cheves explains that many of the early pioneers to the Utah Territory came from England where the use of cooperatives was widespread. A strong and overwhelming anomaly exists in western state tokens. We conducted a comparative count of known Utah co-op and mercantile tokens versus known co-op and mercantile tokens from other western states using state token directories. Our count included tokens from Nevada, Idaho, Colorado and Arizona. We found Utah has a significant number of co-op tokens, and no other western state has anything close, while the number of known mercantile tokens is a close count between Utah and surrounding states For example, Utah’s neighboring states Nevada, Idaho and Colorado have only one known co-op token each, compared to the 41 known co-op tokens from Utah. However, while Utah has 27 known mercantile tokens, Idaho has an astounding 75, Colorado has 29 and Arizona has 6. (Nevada is a distant 4th with only 1). A chart of our findings appears at the end of this paper and indicates that the Utah system of pioneer minor coinage was unique in America, and may have therefore developed in conjunction with strong Mormon Church beliefs of Church, family and community. The need has arisen to identify which tokens are truly Mormon Church related. The proposed answer is that any co-ops or mercantiles with majority ownership by prominent Mormon Church members are thus potentially Mormon Church controlled in spirit. This is a difficult area to research since the records of all of the co-ops and mercantiles may no longer exist. It can be surmised that any such business entity that is headed or owned by a prominent Mormon Church member, or has a Board with prominent Church members, is thus Mormon related.