Collecting
The $1,000 Bill That Could Be Worth $3 Million
Maybe keeping your money in cash isn’t such a bad idea after all.
The so-called Marcy Note, a $1,000 bill printed in 1891.
Source: Stacks Bowers Galleries
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.