Posted on 06/04/2009 8:12:18 PM PDT by BGHater
South Carolina is selling money to make money.
State officials have quietly picked through boxes of Civil War state currency and auctioned it on eBay, providing the state archives with an influx of cash amid tight budgets.
"These are very bad times. This helps us a great deal. We can pay for things we could never afford otherwise," said Charles Lesser, a senior archivist at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.
About 40 boxes of the currency were supposed to be destroyed more than a century ago, but some of the bills were tucked away in the Statehouse basement and eventually moved to the state archives. They sat there largely undisturbed for four decades and only recently did officials realize they could sell the cash.
The archives have made about $200,000 selling hundreds of the bills over the past couple of years. Most of that money was made in an auction of uncut sheets of the currency last year, but every week or so, South Carolina puts a couple of loose bills up for sale online. The old money is a little wider, whiter and lighter than today's paper money.
Last month, a bill from the Bank of South Carolina worth $4 when it was issued almost 150 years ago fetched nearly $400.
The man behind the project is 74-year-old Jack Meyer, a retired University of South Carolina history professor who volunteers about eight hours a month to sift through the boxes and find bills in good enough condition to sell. In 1 1/2 years he's made it through one of the 40 boxes.
"I've got job security," he quips.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
Rare Civil War Treasury Note Found[VA]
Civil war, general interest ping.
It’s cool they did this! I would like to see California sell off some of it’s assets rather than ask the taxpayers to pay more.
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Thanks BGHater. |
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Mayberry general obligation bond so my house doesn’t get repo’d
ping.
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