12-21-2018, 03:07 AM
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The $1,000 Bill That Could Be Worth $3 Million
In 1891, the U.S. Treasury printed some $1,000 bills, around 1,500 of them. Rather than enter mass circulation, though, the silver certificates were primarily used as a sort of proto-wire transfer among banks, says Peter Treglia, the director of currency for Stacks Bowers Galleries, a coin and currency auctioneer.
As a result, the bills never made it into private hands; they never even stayed in banks’ hands for long. “Back then, currency changed so frequently that the 1891 bills only circulated for two to three years,” Treglia says.
One of those $1,000 bills ended up in the Smithsonian. Another remained in a private collection for over 80 years; its first reported sale as a collectible item, rather than a piece of currency, was in the 1970s. The rest, presumably, were lost. (“I’d bet a lot of money that another one of these notes won’t turn up,” Treglia says. “Things are discovered all the time, but not of this magnitude.”)
That single remaining note, dubbed the “Marcy Note” because it features a portrait of U.S. Senator (also secretary of war and governor of New York) William Marcy, is now up for auction with an estimate of $2 million to $3 million.
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