Silver Certificates - 1934-1957

The teller was whipping through dollar bills during our conversation, and I asked her, "do you ever come across old money... silver, reds?"

"Oh sure, yeah the old folks bring 'em in".

"What do you do with them?"

"We hold them aside, there are people who come in and ask for them.  Here [flip flip flip flip, lays out a 1934 silver certificate One Dollar bill], like these".

I reached into my purse and pulled out a single, promptly slapping it in the well underneath the bulletproof glass.  "Can I have that?"


In the early '90s, I started holding on to $2 bills and checking with the bank for silver certificates.  It's been almost twenty years since I asked for them, and today as I was cleaning, I added it to my existing collection.  Surprisingly, the $2's are very crisp and mostly 1976 issue, but I noticed some very interesting things about the silver certs.  Je vous presente les certs.  You can click on them for the large size photos.

I hope that you can see how vibrantly green these bills were.  Look at the three bills pictured together in the above photo (series 1935), compared with the bill in the top of the picture (1957).  In person, these '35s almost emerald... Greenbacks.  How cool is that one at the bottom of the picture, series 1934.

Sometimes I hate cleaning, but then I see what kinds of cool things I've collected over the years.  These are from some relatively prominent times... the Great Depression, the Golden Age of the 50s, the bicentennial in 1976, and some of the $2's are from the Reagan era, which to me is prominent because my family was lifted out of a dire financial state through his policies.

I love this country.