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DID MARMORA INVENT MONEY

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“But dear brother, we have no money here. The best farmer in the country must when he is going out a journey, he must take wheat tic or oats or some such commodity to bear his expense in the towns traveling. We will not see one shilling in the course of a year.

 

Royal Keyes, writing to his brother in September 1834. Royal farmed north of Marmora until his death at the age of 107

Royal Keyes was not complaining about how poor he was.  He wasn’t poor. In the same letter he boasted of a flourishing farm and three good meals of meat daily. He was complaining about the lack of coins and bills themselves.

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Money is a strange thing. The rule is clear--it is only worth anything if another person thinks so. It is only of any use if you  can trust that someone else will accept it in payment of something you really need. If you can’t trust the coins or bills, or, if you don’t even have them, trade gets complicated. But when it is trusted, it is a convenience that a growing economy cannot do without.

Instead of shillings or dollars, which weren’t flowing around the new colony, locals were forced to use barter. But when surplus crops needed to be converted to other food or seeds or livestock, the barter system was just not convenient enough. How, after all, could Royal walk or ride the 8 miles to a market with a bushel of wheat to buy perhaps an overcoat? How much wheat makes a coat or a jar of honey or a frypan? Who knows? Would Royal have to carry his wheat back and forth if what he wanted to trade it for was not available that day? What was needed was something light, that could fit in your wallet, and easily go back and forth and symbolize the value of the wheat. That is what coins and bills, if trusted, do.

 In Upper Canada, before a centralized government mint was established to stamp out ‘Canadian Coins’, the need for coins was clear. Farmers, miners, bar tenders, and financiers, all came to accept a wide variety of coinage. The exchange rate was set by law for whatever was floating around--for British Guineas, Crowns, and Shillings, and for American Eagles, and for Portuguese Johannes and Moidores. Set even for Spanish Doubloons, Pistareens, and Pistoles, and for French Louis d’Ors, Livres and Sols Tournois. It didn’t matter where it came from, they worked,  but any gold and silver coins were carefully weighed before being accepted.
If even these national coins were not around, traders often resorted to ‘commercial tokens’, semi-official coins struck by early banks or businesses. One such halfpenny token bore the blunt message—'No Labour; No Bread’. If you had laboured for it, you could buy bread with it. In case you missed the message, the reverse read—'Speed the Plough’. One 1838 Token valued as ‘one stiver’ proclaimed, ‘Trade and Navigation’ on one side and on the other ‘Pure Copper Preferable to Paper!’.

One of the most unusual substitutes for government coinage was this half penny token.                                           

If the image on front looks familiar it may because it was associated with Marmora. It was on the village’s old official seals. What’s more our Ironworks started with shovelling and ended with the blacksmith’s anvil.

Was this early ‘money’ our invention? Here is more evidence that it might have been.

The date was 1820 when the Ironworks to be built at Marmora was a topic of discussion, especially in Kingston where the first bank in Upper Canada was being floated. It was there that our first Ironmaster, Charles Hayes, arrived and where our second Ironmaster, Anthony Manahan, carried on a commercial business. Was this one of their projects?

People learned to love their tokens. The government learned to hate them. Governments like to be in charge of the mint. The right to just print off tokens had to be denied if ‘Government Money’ were to take over. In 1825 commercial tokens were banned. Like most good things they survived, at least briefly in spite of the law. Some have speculated that the tokens just kept being stamped out, backdated so as to escape the new rules.

So did Marmora once invent some ‘money’.  We don’t know for sure but at the risk of inventing history,  we can say  it is a definite maybe. Or maybe it is all a ‘coin-incidence’