1 Cent Wisconsin; Liquor Tax

Wisconsin's wartime liquor tax stamps occupy a genuinely strange corner of fiscal paper — too small to be banknotes, too monetarily specific to be dismissed as mere revenue labels. The Beverage Tax Division issued these 1-cent denominations during 1943 to document individual drink taxes at the point of sale, a system driven partly by wartime revenue demands and partly by the state's long institutional nervousness about alcohol following Prohibition's repeal a decade earlier.

At 26 x 24 mm, these are among the smallest official fiscal paper instruments Wisconsin produced. Attrition rates were extraordinary — most were affixed, cancelled, or simply lost.