20 pfennigs (treasure from Rarwino)

At the end of the 1980s, in the village of Rarwino, in the municipality of Kamień Pomorski, a state farm employee found a treasure of dominial coins in the manor park. The find, transferred to the Regional Museum in Kamień Pomorski, and after its liquidation in 1991, to the National Museum in Szczecin, consists of 492 tokens, which can be divided into two types.

Group I contains token coins in denominations of 1, 10, and 50 pfennigs. One pfennig is made of zinc, the rest are made of brass. They are characterized by the lack of inscriptions, unrefined design and a hole at the edge. They were probably the products of a local craftsman and functioned as typical clearing marks which, strung on strings, were worn by overseers and issued to workers as required. Group II includes 10 and 20 pfennig token coins, machine-minted from nickel-plated zinc and brass by one of many companies producing scrip in Germany in the years 1916-1921.

The presented 20 pfennig token, like all token coins from the Rarwino deposit, are struck horizontally with a signature crowned capital letter M. Such markings usually refer to the name of the property or its owner, but in this case it was not possible to connect it to any known owner of the Rarwino property. The other features of the coin are characteristic of the design of companies producing scrip: face value 20 in the obverse field, the inscription WERTH - MARKE above and below a bulleted section intended for stamping the owner's signature. The reverse field shows only the face value of 20. A specific number of such ready-made tokens were delivered to the ordering party, probably together with the ownership stamp. It can be assumed that the presented copy comes from the years 1916–1918, when token coins served as real money. Later, they were minted mainly for collectors.

Mieszko Pawłowski