Here’s another in our series of the many different Illinois provisional sales tax tokens.
This is the provisional token from La Salle, IL and was redeemable at the Chamber of Commerce. It is listed in the M&D book as number “L54”, held the value of a quarter of a cent at the time, had a rarity rating of R3 at the time of the M&D book and is made of copper.
You may notice that this is the first of the Illinois tokens that I’ve posted which has the same front & back.
The La Salle are quite common, especially as there have been so many of them offered for sale on eBay in the last 10 years. There are probably no more than 500 serious Sales Tax Token collectors, at the most, and there are far more of these issues than collectors. Every collector needs one though! I would agree with our moderator for a price in the $2-$3 range if they are “pretty” and not “spoty”. Or is that “spotty”?
Ralph, I would say $2-5 each, depending on condition.
I would like to know the value of three 1/4 cent LaSalle tolens
I have three tokens, What are their value?
In the last large book I finished, Sales Tax Tokens and Scrip; Histories - there were over 1 million words of information in 891 pages, and some of the questions you have can be answered there. However, if you want to do research yourself to answer these very specific questions I strongly recommend that you go to your local library (hopefully, you are already a member) and get their coding for being able to access their newspaper files for free. Some libraries even allow you to do that from your home computer, and as I say, it is free. Often, the smaller papers had many items that were passed over by the larger newspapers. The reason that is important is that if you research through one of the regular newspaper affiliate services, which can be expensive for a short time, the vast majority of the papers that are accessable are from larger cities, not from the small towns.
Although it is a great way to day dream about what was and how what happened did happen, keep in mind that in most cases the decisions, especially as it concerned the Illinois metal tokens and scrip, were made by a small group of town or provisional members, with the only thought being to have something in hand for use as soon as was possible. It is actually quite surprising that so many of them did turn out as well as they did, style wise. It is also amazing to see that from the time some of the locations decided to issue their own tokens to the time they were in use was sometimes less than 2 weeks.
And last, of course I mention it all the time, but it is important to remember, only a few of the Illinois sales tax tokens actually said that they were used for tax. Many of them did not mention tax, let alone that they were used for sales tax. But since we had several collectors and dealers who were able to verify their use as sales tax tokens in 1935 (George Mcgee - hope I’m spelling that right) being the most prominent.
As usual for me I think about the process of creating and making the token when I look at images of tokens. Two things intrigue me when I compare the Monmouth and La Salle token images. First is the comma between city and state. On the Monmouth token the comma is needed to separate MONMOUTH from ILL so it doesn’t look like MONMOUT HILL. But the comma is not needed to separate LA SALLE from ILLINOIS because the words are on separate lines. But there it is! Second, the Monmouth token has a very nicely styled cent sign but on the La Salle token a “c” stencil used as a substitute for a cent sign. I wonder “Who made these decisions?” Was it someone or a committee in the civic group that placed the order or was it left to the die-maker when making the die? Or was it someone else? We may never know but I still wonder.