1 Cent - Arapahoe Super Foods Leadville, Colorado

Leadville, Colorado sits at over 10,000 feet — the highest incorporated city in the United States — and the town's economic isolation made local merchant scrip a practical necessity well into the twentieth century. Arapahoe Super Foods issued this 1-cent note as store credit or change scrip, a workaround for the chronic small-coin shortages that plagued remote mountain communities where banks were sparse and coin supply unpredictable.

Retailer-issued paper in fractional denominations is among the least systematically documented of all American ephemeral currency, and Leadville examples are particularly scarce in established catalogs.