Scrip

In 1910, the L&N pushed its railroad into remote Harlan County, Kentucky, opening up access to billions of tons of coal, the fuel that ran everything during the Industrial Revolution. Coal did it all, from coke for the steel mills, to power for the new national electrical grid, and coal gas for the street lights. The country's largest corporations and richest men rushed in-- Ford Motor Company, US Steel, Chicago Edison, International Harvester, Peabody Energy, the Mellons, the Carnegies, bringing with them a system they had perfected: scrip. What if you didn't have to pay your workers? Not really, not in cash? What if you could make your own currency and make it worth whatever you wanted it to be? Scrip was a system designed to pay miners in pinto beans and corn meal from the company store, and make billions in profits for the coal companies. The fragments of history and the sheer volume of scrip documented in these pages from just one small Kentucky county shows how pervasive this system became and how it impoverished the workers they left behind.