The Check is Not in the Mail, Posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2025

One of the most interesting items in the Scott Family Collection is a simple silver dollar. The dollar is part of the Melville Dairy display, and it is placed right next to a photograph of Ralph H. Scott, one of the founders of Melville Dairy. In the photograph, Ralph is sitting at his desk behind a huge pile of silver dollars some of which were used to meet payroll for the month of August, 1952.

 In fact, I should say two payrolls, one for the plant employees and one for the farmers who supplied their milk to the dairy.

Why on earth would a modern, state of the art milk processing plant choose to meet a monthly payroll using coins?

Well, the explanation is simple. Despite promoting the dairy as a simple, local, home town dairy, which of course it was, Melville Dairy was, in fact, a huge contributor to the economy of Alamance County. In a single month, 60,000 dollars flowed from the two dairy payrolls into the economy of Alamance County.

But how to make this contribution visible?

Well, silver dollars were a rarity back then. According to Otis Lackey, former Assistant Manager of Melville Dairy, you did not encounter silver dollars much in your daily life. So the appearance of so many of them all at once all over Alamance County, was a way to get noticed.

The coins were ordered from a bank in Charlotte and they were delivered to the Burlington Post Office. A Melville Dairy truck picked them up from the Post Office and delivered them to the plant. The coins were sorted into bags and used to pay the plant employees and the farmers. People used the coins everywhere, and they began to pop up in cash registers all over the county.

Even today, 73 years later, many visitors to the Scott Family Collection will stop in front of the display and tells us excitedly how a relative who worked at the dairy saved out some of their silver dollars to give them to family members as mementos.

Now that is great marketing!