Pueblo tokens and scrip

A steel town with a company store, two hundred saloons and a streetcar line leaves a lot of metal behind. This page is a map of what Pueblo issued, what it is called in the catalogs, and where to go to find out who issued it.

The company store: Colorado Supply Company scrip

Colorado Fuel & Iron ran the Minnequa steelworks in Pueblo and dozens of coal and iron camps across southern Colorado. Its retail arm was the Colorado Supply Company, which opened its first store at the Rouse mining camp in September 1888 and by 1904 had thirty-one stores, one in nearly every CF&I camp. The Pueblo main store was the hub, and a large Minnequa branch opened in 1902 at Northern and Abriendo, later moving to a Mission-style building on Baystate Avenue that burned in 1953.

Miners who needed an advance before payday could draw it in scrip, company credit good only at company stores, for a five percent charge. Converting scrip to cash through a broker cost far more. The practice was a standing grievance: Colorado outlawed payment in scrip in 1899 and the law was widely ignored, the 1894 and 1913 strike demands both called for its abolition, and CF&I promised in 1910 to end it. The company's own store history puts the actual discontinuance in December 1912, and the surviving pieces agree: scrip dated October 1910 exists.

What survives is paper, not metal. The pieces recorded so far are printed merchandise certificates, roughly 82 by 51 mm, reading in part "This is not intended to be used as money … the Colorado Supply Co. agrees to furnish the bearer merchandise to the amount of …", with a serial number and a treasurer's signature. Three issues are on record:

Pritchard files them under Denver because the scrip is dated at CF&I's Denver headquarters, which is worth knowing before you go looking under Pueblo. The one metal piece attributed to the company is a 32 mm aluminum token reading "2 pounds powder, the Colorado Supply Company", a blasting-powder check listed under Trinidad. Colorado coal scrip is far scarcer than the West Virginia material that fills most scrip collections, and whether Colorado Supply appears in the Edkins coal-scrip catalog is something we have not been able to confirm.

Saloons, cigar stores and the Elks: trade tokens

Pueblo's merchant tokens are the ordinary brass and aluminum "good for 5 in trade" pieces that every western town issued between about 1890 and Prohibition, and there are a great many of them. TokenCatalog, the collector-built database, held 680 Pueblo listings when we checked in October 2026, against about 12,000 for all of Colorado. Almost every attribution in those records was made by a collector sitting with a Pueblo city directory, which tells you how the research is done.

A sample of what is recorded, with the Pritchard number where one has been assigned:

• 5th Ave. Bar, 505 Santa Fe Ave. Brass, 21 mm, "good for 5 in trade", cut-out S. I. M. Searcy's saloon, 1909 to 1914. Pritchard PU100.
• The Ajax Bar, 231 So. Main. Brass, 21 mm. Pendergast Bros. & Russ, liquor dealers, in the 1912 to 1915 directories. Pritchard PU130.
• Oriental, 224 N. Main St. and 120 & 122 W. 3rd St., L. L. Gray. Aluminum, round, octagonal and one heart-shaped variety, 2 and 5 in trade. Gray ran the Hotel Maine, the Oriental Bar, the Oriental Café and the Oriental Cigar Store in 1911. Several surfaced from a hoard found at the Mercantile National Bank in Pueblo.
• A. F., 140 So. Santa Fe Ave. Brass, 21 mm. Angelo Francisco's saloon, 1906 to 1909.
• Shorty Adams, 5c trade. Brass, scalloped, 29 mm. Pritchard PU125.
• "90". A brass octagon, 26 mm, used by the Pueblo Elks lodge as a 10. Pritchard PU110.
• 402 Northern Ave., Bessemer. Brass, 21 mm, from the mill neighborhood south of the river.

Pritchard's numbers use a town prefix, PU for Pueblo, so a dealer's "Pritchard PU130" is the Ajax Bar. The older Wright and Nott catalog uses CMT numbers; you still meet them in auction descriptions from the 1980s and 1990s.

Medals

The Mineral Palace opening medal, 1891

The Colorado Mineral Palace opened on July 4, 1891, on twenty-seven acres north of downtown: Otto Bulow's domed exhibition hall for the state's ores, bankrupt twice in its first decade and pulled down for scrap in 1942 or 1943 depending on who you ask. A white-metal medal, 51 mm, was struck to commemorate the opening. The obverse shows the palace with the legend "To commemorate the opening of Colorado Mineral Palace, Pueblo, Colo."; the reverse lists the directors, W. W. Palmer as president among them, over a view of the rear of the building. The only specimen we can point to is in a private registry collection of Colorado exonumia whose owner has never encountered another. It carries no HK number and we have found no auction record for it. It may be the rarest Pueblo piece there is.

A Lesher dollar with a Pueblo imprint, 1901

Joseph Lesher's silver Referendum dollars were stamped with the names of the merchants who agreed to accept them, and one of those merchants was D. W. Klein & Co. of Pueblo. That variety is HK-794 in the So-Called Dollars reference. The whole story is on our Lesher dollars page.

The Pueblo Centennial medal, 1970

For the city's hundredth year the Franklin Mint struck a 39 mm medal, "Pueblo Centennial 1870–1970, Under Five Flags", reverse "Pueblo, Colorado, the Sunsational City", in silver and in bronze. Common, inexpensive and the easiest Pueblo medal to own.

Streetcar and bus fares

Horse cars ran in Pueblo from 1879 and electric cars from June 12, 1890, under a procession of owners: the Pueblo City Railway, Pueblo Traction & Lighting, the Arkansas Valley Railway, Light & Power Company and finally, from 1923, the Southern Colorado Power Company, which ran the last car on November 29, 1947. Fare tokens are listed in the Atwood-Coffee transportation-token catalog under Colorado, city number 760. The one we can describe with confidence is Southern Colorado Power's zinc half-fare token of 1942, 22.9 mm, "good for ½ fare", Atwood-Coffee CO 760 G. Bus tokens from the late 1940s onward exist in dealer listings, and the full run of letters under CO 760 is in the catalog.

Where to research a Pueblo piece

• Pueblo City-County Library, Local History and Genealogy, third floor of the Rawlings Library, 100 E. Abriendo Ave. The Pueblo city directories are here, which is how a "good for 5" with an address becomes a named saloon and a date range. Also Pueblo newspapers on microfilm and a digital photo archive. pueblolibrary.org
• Steelworks Center of the West, 215 Canal St. The museum of CF&I, in the old Minnequa works office building, and the Steelworks Archives: six thousand cubic feet of company records, the Colorado Supply Company among them, and the company magazines Camp and Plant and The Industrial Bulletin. Archive research is by appointment. steelworks.us
• El Pueblo History Museum, 301 N. Union Ave. History Colorado's Pueblo museum; it holds a model of the Mineral Palace and mounted the 2022 Mineral Palace exhibition. historycolorado.org
• Pueblo Heritage Museum, 201 W. B St., in the 1924 Rio Grande freight station, run by the Pueblo County Historical Society. pueblohistory.org
• TokenCatalog, for the 680 Pueblo listings and the attributions other collectors have already made. tokencatalog.com
• The USC CF&I digital project, a scholarly site built on the Steelworks archives with a chapter on the Colorado Supply Company and its scrip. scalar.usc.edu

Pueblo once had a coin club; the only trace of it we can find is an old directory entry with a bank address and no meeting time, so treat it as dormant. The nearest active clubs are in Colorado Springs, listed on the Colorado page.

Sources

• Colorado Fuel and Iron Company digital project, University of Southern California Scalar: Introduction to the Colorado Supply Company; The Colorado Supply store in CF&I's mining camps; The Minnequa branch.
• TokenCatalog records TC-308743, TC-308744, TC-308745 and TC-321595 (Colorado Supply Co.); TC-319319, TC-319324, TC-527181, TC-588959, TC-319323, TC-319320, TC-672878 (Pueblo merchants). tokencatalog.com, searched October 2026.
• Stuart M. Pritchard Jr., A Guide to Colorado Merchant Trade Tokens, Jinglebob Press, 2004. James R. Wright and Herbert Lee Nott, Colorado Merchant Tokens, 2 vols. and supplement, 1977–1979.
• Legends of America, Ludlow, Colorado, on the 1899 scrip law and the 1894, 1910 and 1913 demands; Wikipedia, Ludlow Massacre, for the September 1913 demands.
• Mineral Palace: History Colorado press release of August 31, 2022, You Should've Seen It; the opening medal is catalogued in the J. Perry Collection of Colorado Coins and Exonumia on the NGC Registry. Pueblo Centennial medal: same collection.
• Streetcars: List of streetcar systems in the United States, citing CDOT's Historic Streetcar Systems of Colorado (2020); operator chronology at transphoto.org. Half-fare token: Numista entry 199372 (Atwood-Coffee CO 760 G).
• Steelworks Center of the West, Archives; Pueblo City-County Library, Local History and Genealogy.