Vintage 1959 Lincoln Sesquicentennial Wooden Nickel 🪙 - Security State Bank & Brownlee Moore Bank Covered Wagon Token 5¢

Why Would Two Rival Banks Share One Wooden Nickel? 🪙 A Vintage 1959 Lincoln Sesquicentennial Wooden Nickel, Security State Bank & Brownlee Moore Bank

Size: 1 1/2" diameter

Read the back of this before anything else, because it is the whole story: REDEEMABLE AT SECURITY STATE BANK OR BROWNLEE MOORE BANK.

Two banks. Two different front doors, two sets of owners, two outfits that spent every other week of the year trying to win the same farmer's deposits away from each other. And for Lincoln's 150th birthday they put their names on the same piece of wood and agreed to honor each other's nickel on the same terms, until the same date.

That does not happen anymore, and it is the part of this little disc I find genuinely great. Today two competing banks would each print their own token, with their own logo and their own app to download. In 1959, in a small Missouri town, somebody walked down the street, sat down with the competition, and said look, it's Lincoln, let's just do this together. And they did. The wood is the receipt.

🔍 Everything printed on it

On the face, WOODEN NICKEL curves over the top and FACE 5¢ VALUE curves under the bottom, with 1809 - 1959 set below the picture. The picture itself is a whole pioneer scene: a covered wagon under a rising sun, four oxen leaning into their yokes two by two, a driver on foot beside the lead pair with one arm up, and a couple of birds overhead. Flip it and the reverse says REDEEMABLE / AT / SECURITY STATE BANK / OR / BROWNLEE MOORE BANK, then Void After Aug. 1, 59. That is everything. No town or state appears anywhere, so the two bank names are the only map you get.

🏦 Who Brownlee and Moore actually were

Follow the Brownlee name and it leads to Brookfield, Missouri, up in Linn County on the old Burlington line across the north Missouri prairie. The first bank in Brookfield opened in 1867 as T. D. Price & Co.; Price had moved over from Hannibal, backed by a silent partner named Sherrell who lived in New York City. Within two years it was reorganized as Price, Brownlee & DeGraw, bringing in Judge William H. Brownlee and Dr. Hamilton DeGraw, and once Price and DeGraw pulled out, the sign read W. H. Brownlee, banker - and his was the only bank in town.

Competition showed up in the 1870s - a second bank, then a third - and in 1878 Brownlee's house and the second one merged as the Linn County Bank: W. H. Brownlee president, W. H. DeGraw cashier, Walter Brownlee assistant cashier. Right through the 1880s and into the '90s it sat on a spot Brookfield people just called the old Brownlee banking corner. That one gets me every time - a family name on a street corner, because that was where everybody's money lived.

In 1893 the two families went their separate ways. The judge stepped down as president, the Linn County Bank packed up and crossed the street to the DeGraw corner, and the Brownlees promptly opened a new bank back on their old spot - the Brownlee Banking Co., with W. H. Brownlee as president, S. E. Crance as vice-president, Walter Brownlee as cashier and R. S. Brownlee as assistant cashier. So now you had two banks staring at each other across one street, run by men who'd been partners weeks before.

Now the Moores. In 1904 James Moore figured Brookfield could use a fourth bank and opened one on South Main Street, with himself in charge and his son Joseph as cashier. At some point over the next few decades the Brownlee and Moore banks joined forces, and the combined name turns up in the Missouri Supreme Court reports: Brownlee-Moore Banking Co. v. Henderson, 345 Mo. 1203, 139 S.W.2d 483, decided May 4, 1940, after a change of venue to the Sullivan Circuit Court. The State Historical Society of Missouri even keeps a Dr. Richard S. Brownlee photograph collection covering 1864 to 1900, family pictures and the bank among them, catalogued under Linn County.

A token you can cash at either of two banks only works if both banks are in the same town, so Security State Bank was Brownlee-Moore's neighbor and rival right there in Brookfield.

👨‍⚖️ The men on that corner

The old Linn County history calls Brownlee and DeGraw the Nestors of Brookfield banking - the elder statesmen. It paints DeGraw as a sage, maybe the best-read man in town, deep into the Bible, political economy, philosophy and even the occult. Brownlee was the poet of the pair, a lover of novels and the classics who, being from Indiana, had a soft spot for Lew Wallace and James Whitcomb Riley. Only two Brookfield banks ever went under: Price's original house and the Bank of Brookfield in the panic. So when a farm-town bank hung out a sign reading Security, it meant it - folks there remembered the banks that hadn't kept their word.

🎩 1959: the year the country looked back at Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born February 12, 1809, and 1809-1959 on the front is his 150th. There was a federal Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, there were parades and pageants and essay contests, and businesses on Main Streets everywhere found a way to fold a piece of national memory into an ordinary week of trade. His face had been on the penny since 1909, the Mint's tribute for his 100th birthday, so by the sesquicentennial that portrait had been wearing smooth in American pockets for fifty years. A Lincoln year handed a small-town bank a dignified reason to put its name in a customer's pocket - the era of the free wall calendar and yardstick at the counter, and in 1959, a wooden nickel.

🐂 The wagon and the oxen

The picture is pure pioneer iconography: westward, onward, breaking new ground. Oxen were the real workhorse of overland settlement - slower than horses, but cheaper and hardier, living on prairie grass and plodding the same steady pace day after day. Lincoln came up in exactly that world of split rails, ox wagons and a one-room cabin, so the wagon on the front and the 1809 beneath it make the same point twice. Up in north Missouri, where plenty of folks in 1959 had grandparents who broke that prairie, nobody needed it explained.

💰 Don't take any wooden nickels

Once upon a time that saying was serious advice: watch who you deal with, don't get shortchanged. By mid-century it had flipped completely, and banks, fairs and Main Street merchants were giving away real wooden nickels for fun. After August 1, 1959 this one wouldn't buy you a thing, and that was the joke - the void date is the punchline, not the fine print. Collectors call this whole world exonumia, coin-like things that were never money, and a bank token with two named sponsors is the kind I'd point at if I were the one buying.

🪙 About these

These are new old stock, left over from the 1959 promotion and never cashed before the deadline ran out. I've got several, so you'll get one from the group rather than the exact one pictured - and since every wooden blank has its own grain and the ink takes a little differently on each, no two look quite alike. The one in my photo is the floor - the rest are as good or better. The supply is finite - nobody's printing 1959 Lincoln nickels for these two banks again, and once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.