1 Cent

The Alaska Rural Rehabilitation Corporation was a New Deal agency established to resettle struggling Midwestern farm families — primarily from the Matanuska Valley colonization project of 1935, which transplanted roughly 200 families from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan to Alaska under federal supervision. The ARRC issued its own scrip coinage because colonists were paid in project credits rather than U.S. currency, redeemable only at the corporation's commissary. Aluminium was chosen deliberately to keep intrinsic value near zero, discouraging hoarding in a closed economy where liquidity control was the entire point.