1 Cent Mexia; PoW Camp

American POW camp canteen scrip occupies a genuinely odd corner of the notaphilic world, and the Mexia issue is a fine example of why. Camp Canteen currency was introduced across U.S. internment facilities during the Second World War to prevent prisoners — mostly German and Italian — from accumulating regular U.S. currency, which could fund escape attempts or black-market dealings. The scrip was redeemable only within the camp system and worthless outside the wire.

Mexia, Texas hosted a POW facility as part of the broader network that held over 400,000 Axis prisoners on American soil by 1945. The orange paper is characteristic of the Mexia series and may have been a deliberate color coding to distinguish denomination.