The Collection
The Mysterious Paper Currency Held Untouched
for more than a Century
Not much is known about the previous owner of this treasure
trove of scarce American currency. About the only thing
that is known is that the notes were stored in a bank vault
in a state on the Eastern seaboard. It is due to this proximity
to the Atlantic Ocean that the notes derived their name:
The Atlantic Collection.
The Atlantic Collection is an amazing collection of consecutive
serial-numbered, Large Sized paper currency from the late
1800's. Virtually unhandled for over a century, the condition
of the notes is pristine. These notes received extremely
high grades under the most rigorous grading standards.
The face value of all the notes in the collection totals
around $20,000 and sold recently for over $10,000,000. This
means a person could have had a 500-time return on his or
her investment by sticking these notes in a trunk and not
looking at them again for over a century.
Think it would have been better in a bank? Hardly, at 4%
interest, the hoarder would have earned less than $2.5 million
over the same time period.
These century-old notes are rare today not only due to
the ephemeral nature of the paper from which they are made,
but also because few people back then would have ever considered
hoarding paper money. In fact, the collecting of paper money
was not widespread until at least 1953 when Robert Friedberg
published Paper Money of the United States. The numbering
system ("Fr. 101," for instance) used in this reference
book remains standard today.
Somewhere in Washington, D.C., these notes are still carried
on a dusty Federal government ledger as "outstanding." Indeed
they are, in more ways than one. Today they represent what
is believed to be the single largest cache of U.S. currency
ever found from this era. The historical and numismatic
significance of this discovery cannot be overstated.
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