Vintage 1970s Tin Litho Special Police Toy Badge 🌟 Laurens County Sheriff's Dept — Japan, Original Card

Who Carried a Laurens County Special Police Badge? 🛡️ A Special Police Badge, Still on the Card

Size: 4" x 2 1/4" ~ New Old Stock, still on its card.

Here's a little 1970s tin litho badge that never left its cardboard home. It's still sealed in the sleeve, pinned to a yellow card with a red banner across the top reading SPECIAL POLICE BADGE. A cartoon motorcycle cop fills the left side of the card: white cap, big goggles strapped across his eyes, gloved hands on the bars, a city skyline behind him. Small letters down in the corner say JAPAN, which is where these were made. The round button rides on the right side of the card, and it's got a name on it: Laurens County. And they're rare - carded or loose, a Laurens County one just doesn't come up for sale.

🌟 Which Laurens County?

The button doesn't say which state, so I'll give you both. There's a Laurens County in South Carolina, formed March 12, 1785, and a Laurens County in Georgia, formed December 10, 1807 — and they share a namesake. The Carolina county is named for Henry Laurens, a Charleston merchant who served as President of the Continental Congress. After that, Congress picked him to go to Holland to raise a loan and win an alliance with the Dutch. In the fall of 1780, not long after he set out, the British frigate Vestal caught his ship off Newfoundland and locked him up in the Tower of London — he's the only American who can say that — and he sat there over a year before he was traded straight-up for General Cornwallis and went on to help negotiate the peace that ended the war. His dispatches went over the side when the Vestal caught him, but the British fished them back out of the water, and in the bundle was a draft of a treaty between the Americans and the Dutch. It helped push Britain into declaring war on the Dutch Republic before 1780 was out. Quite a haul to pull out of the North Atlantic.

The Georgia county is named for his son, Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, an aide-de-camp to George Washington who was killed in 1782, one of the last men lost before the fighting stopped. It happened on August 27 at the Combahee River in South Carolina, in what General Nathanael Greene called "a paltry little skirmish" with a British foraging party, and that December the British pulled out of Charleston. Whichever Laurens County this badge was made for, it's the same family's name riding on that button.

If it's the Carolina one, that's Piedmont country, a county of forests and gently rolling hills in the old upcountry. There's a good old story about how the county seat landed where it is: the delegation sent to pick the spot met at John Rodgers' distillery, and tradition has it that after imbibing freely they climbed the hill, found a level place, and chose it for the courthouse. The sober explanation is that there was water close by and five upcountry roads met right there, but I know which version I'd rather tell. By the turn of the century the county was spinning cotton instead of just growing it: Laurens Cotton Mill opened in 1895 and a mill in Clinton followed in 1896, the Lydia, Watts and Joanna mills started up too, and the company-built mill villages around them stayed a big part of Laurens County life until well after World War II.

⭐ The Button Itself

It's a round tin litho piece with a red rim and a yellow-green band inside it, and at the center a black shield outlined in red. LAURENS arches across the top of the shield in orange, and COUNTY curves along the bottom to match. Dead center sits a pale blue five-point star, and printed across the star in black block letters: SHERIFF'S DEPT. Simple, bright, and built to catch a kid's eye.

🗓️ When These Were Made

No date is printed on the card itself, but the family it comes from gives it away. This same yellow card also turns up with a New York badge copying the NYPD patch adopted July 1, 1971, a San Francisco badge copying the patch the SFPD put on its uniform in 1970, and a sheriff's badge printed 1776-1976 for the Bicentennial. Loose buttons from the series have a cream plastic back moulded MADE IN JAPAN and PAT. NO. 1196679, a Japanese utility-model registration filed in November 1972 and granted in 1977. That makes this a 1970s badge, from a run of cards that hung on the racks in that decade.

And tin was an old trade in Japan by then. Under the Allied occupation after the war, 1945 to 1952 with General MacArthur in charge for most of it, Japan's tin toy makers got the go-ahead to start production again, and by the end of the 1950s Japan had become a tin toy powerhouse. Cheaper plastic took over through the 1960s, so a tin litho button on a card like this one comes from late in that long run.

👮 Junior Deputies, Safety Patrols, and the World This Badge Lived In

There is a real history standing behind every toy badge like this one. This was the era of the junior deputy and the school safety patrol: sheriffs' offices swore children in as honorary junior deputies at fairs and school assemblies, safety patrol programs — running strong since the 1920s — pinned badges on generations of schoolchildren, and a visit from an officer with badges to hand out was a fixture of American civic childhood. A Laurens County Sheriff's Department badge belonged to that world. Sheriffs gave tin badges just like this one out as prizes in their youth programs, too. When a child pinned one on, the game borrowed its seriousness from programs that were entirely real — and that is part of the history a survivor like this one still carries.