Rotting bags of silver dollars
RogerB
Posts: 8,852 ✭✭✭✭✭
This subject pops up now and then, and was covered in several short articles by Nancy Oliver and Richard Kelly. Here's a very early letter on the subject. It is also the first mention I've seen of any US Mint using a counting machine.
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I wonder if the coin counter back then was accurate or just "close"
Brandt Cashier and other companies made solid, reliable, accurate coin counters and dispensers for businesses. This was still the age of weekly cash wage envelopes, and company cashiers used machines to dispense correct payroll amounts to hundreds of workers every Saturday at noon.
Thanks. Good information.
After counting, most of the coins were put in boxes instead of bags. But when the boxes were shipped to sub-treasuries or FRBs, they were usually bagged again with a Treasury or FRB seal rather than a Mint seal.
Wow, that letter is a treasure by itself. Wonder what kind of toning those damp dollars got.
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They should have increased the minimum wage back then, instead of letting the bags rot.
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My suspicion - and it is only that - is that the very best toned Morgan dollars are from the rotted bags and water damage. These appeared in quantity in the 1960s as the Treasury stock was drawn down. The Treasury/Mint also melted many coins due to excessive discoloration between 1895 and about 1901 when they settled into the new vaults.
The age of cash pay envelopes lasted well beyond the 1890s. It was still common in the 1940s. Just when did the practice fade away?
Interesting letter... but why were the bags wet? Was there seepage through the walls/floor? Were the vaults in sub-basements? @RogerB....can you clarify that point? Cheers, RickO
An excellent question. I have been promoting a theory for decades that the half dollar was a useful coin when cashiers were making up pay envelopes, because it was easier to use one half than two quarters, but that the switch to paychecks significantly diminished the demand for half dollars. Then of course the hoarding of the Kennedy half finished it off.
Hey..... if they paid in real silver dollars, they could "say" the minimum wage was back to a dollar an hour.
Huh? Huh, huh, huh?
I was paid via cash pay envelope in 1960 when I worked on an onion farm in Dayton, NV.
bob
It's nice to see that they worked on Saturdays back then
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Bad transactions with : nobody to date
And on Sunday according to the letter of Monday 1/7/1895
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Bad transactions with : nobody to date
Very interesting. Yes the Gold & Silver was kept in the basement. It crazy to think of the time in days it took them to count the silver. 200,000 in a day with many attending to. Today the Mint can count 1M coins per 30 minutes.
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Actually now that I think.................If they are all fairly new you could build a five sided box that would hold a certain number of stacked and tiered coins, fill it up and dump it and repeat.
JMO
Successful transactions with : MICHAELDIXON, Manorcourtman, Bochiman, bolivarshagnasty, AUandAG, onlyroosies, chumley, Weiss, jdimmick, BAJJERFAN, gene1978, TJM965, Smittys, GRANDAM, JTHawaii, mainejoe, softparade, derryb, Ricko
Bad transactions with : nobody to date
Was January 7, 1895 to early for any of those rotting bags to contain 1895 dollars? Or..... could the letter actually have been written January 7 1896 and dated 1895, don't we all make that mistake on our checks etc. for the first few days of a new year?
it's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide
Maybe those rotten bags are what produced some of those toners...
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The day of the week mentioned in the letter [Saturday Jan 5th] and the following day 'Sunday' line up with the letter being written on January 7, 1895
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Bad transactions with : nobody to date
Pablo Escobar once had so much money rotting away (being destroyed by huge populations of rats) that he donated millions and millions to the country and villages and peoples etc. A lump sum was given to the government but who knows what the real number ever was.
Minimum wage should be increased today. If it was in the physical form of notes and coins it would rot today too. It's just numbers now. You can get paid to let it rot today because you don't need a giant Scrooge McDuck-ian vault to hoard it all.
Duh! Should have dusted off my 1895 calendar before I let my mind run wild.
it's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide
1895 silver dollars were struck at the end of June. But, overcrowded, confused vault conditions might have jumbled the location of 12 lonely bags of dollars.
RE: "Why were the bags wet? Was there seepage through the walls/floor? Were the vaults in sub-basements?"
Poor vault design allowed moisture to accumulate, probably through the stone & concrete foundation or possibly wicking upward from an improperly prepared foundation. This happened in the old (#2) mint building which had been modified many times. Also, the earlier mint buildings were not intended to store large quantities of coins. Deposited gold and silver was supposed to be converted promptly into coins and returned to depositors, and then into circulation. Changes in mint laws and regulations, and increased use of checks led to coins accumulating in vaults that were not intended to bear the weight of millions of coins. (In this case, about 42 million total.)
The coin counters back then were mechanical and accurate.
Today the use electronics to count
I think I posted this newspaper passage on another topic....
seems to fit better here
A Silver Avalanche
A Slide of Two Million Silver Dollars at the Philadelphia Mint.
A portion of the $50,000,000 that was stored in vault C
at the mint came very close to being a cause of disaster to
several clerks who were counting the coin on Tuesday afternoon.
An avalanche of silver dollars, released from their bundles through
the rotting of the bags, poured down into the space where the clerks were
standing, and only through their hasty escape was a loss of life prevented.
The coin was piled up in bags to a height of 12 feet and a width of 8 feet.
The vault is damp, and the bags had become moldy and frail.
About 8 o'clock, as Wellington Morris, an employee, was standing on
top of the pile raking in some loose dollars, he trod into a bag, and
the silver dollars at once began to slide out. Like a snowball on a mountain
side, the mass of silver dollars grew in size. There was an ominous rumble,
and the clerks at the foot of the pile looked up in surprise. Seeing the impending
danger, a wild break was made fore the door. Serious injury to Morris, was feared,
but he succeeded in escaping unhurt.
The impact of the dollars shook the mint building as by an earthquake, and
intense excitement prevailed among the employees. It is estimated that the amount
which fell was valued at fully $2,000,000 and weighed 112,000 pounds.
The accident caused a change to be made in the method of counting. Heretofore
the counting has been facilitated by the use of a pair of scales, $1,000 being counted
and weighed at a time. Now it will be necessary to county the dollars, one by one,
and the work will probably consume six months, possibly an entire year...
May 31, 1894 Los Angeles Herald....
rake marks and Mint State sliders
Fun article.
The article conflicts with the short letter in that the letter notes that bags on top were OK. The article implies otherwise. Also, why would anyone be on top raking coins --- ? Likely that everyone was at or close to floor level and the raking caused rotted bags to burst.
This is why that many of the Continental Bank hoard of dollar bags had mixed dates in Bu bags. During Spring break in 1963 my roommate and I spent several days going to Continental bank cash room getting a couple bags of dollars, hauling them a couple blocks to the old Morrison Hotel, finding an empty banquet room and pouring out the bags looking for 1903-O dollars. We then replaced what we took out and returned the bags to the Harris bank and went back for more bags to go thru. We got several rolls of 03-O’s and also pulled out several rolls of other dated real gems. The 03-0 dollars went fast starting out at $150 @ quickly down to $50 and ending at $15 each. Rolls of GEM dollar rolls were very hard to sel at $25 to $30 a roll at shows. Almost 40 years later when Rarcoa got the hoard there were even halfbags of sorted circulated 83S and 84S dollars that were Ef to Unc (60ish).
I can't find references to mechanical coin counters that far back. What documentation is there showing Brandt having such devices? I can't find any patents for coin counters until after 1900 and even the ones in early 1900's were manual "helper" types, not machines.
Edited to add: I found a page describing the Brandt Automatic Cashier but it's first deployment was in 1899, 4 years before the letter in the OP. Here is the link to Brandt history:
http://www.watertownhistory.org/Articles/BrandtManufacturing.htm
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It would make sense that agricultural workers who were often hired on a day-to-day basis would be paid cash daily. I am wondering when regularly employed factory or office workers stopped getting cash and started getting checks.
Interesting thought. I subscribed to the theory that the hoarding of the coins honoring JFK combined with the elimination of silver caused the coins to quit circulating.
I remember half dollars circulating commonly until 1975/76. When the Bicentennial designs came out, they were hoarded and effectively this was the final hurrah for the half dollar.
By commonly, I don't mean that you would receive one every day in commerce, but it was not terribly unusual to see them in cash tills or to receive one in change.
If you handed a cashier a half dollar in 1976 they would immediately toss it in the drawer and knew what its value was.
Today, you would stop the checkout line and have to wait for the manager to verify (and in most cases, he/she would not know either).
Try it sometime if you are bored.
As I recall, Ed Milas of Rarcoa first displayed
some of the Dollars from the Continental Bank
Hoard at a Las Vegas Show. (might have had
some at a Chicago show before, but I seem
to recall the excitement at the Vegas show
as being the 'first time' these were publicly
displayed.
He had two showcases (maybe 3?) filled with
some incredibly white stonily lusterous dollars,
mostly "S" mints, which were selling well.
Less popular, but sticking much more in my
memory, were the superbly toned dollars,
(again, mostly "S" mints) which had some of
most wonderful toning on them I'd seen;
fully toned on one side, partial toning on others,
just an absolute eye-catching group of toned
Morgan Dollars - the best group I'd ever seen,
before or after.
.
RE: "...a recent decent paying job was recently denied me because i stated i would not work between fri sundown to saturday sundown."
Head to NY city.....lots of businesses run by Hasidim families would hire you in a minute. They hold the same work restrictions.
clogged gutters
Ever try to put onions in an envelope?
I'd like to see just one of those environmentally destroyed beauties, today.
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tyvm for the info. and a valid point.
our Messiah has made is clear to me i'm to be in this area, otherwise i’d consider a major relocation. although i dont know where this is going, so it still may result in one.
it is amazing how much guidance is given us during our life and most we dont do much with for a myriad of reasons. when we listen and act, things get more interesting thereafter.
.
I don't think there was a machine involved, but I was getting cash in pay envelopes in the late 70s. Of course, it was a grocery store in the days before credit cards were accepted in such places, so they had lots of cash on hand.
The "Brandt Cashier" was one in common business use, but there were other brands. I mention Brandt because they were asked to test the new design dimes from the first production run in late August 1916. AT&T also participated.
The account I read of the Brandt Cashier indicated that it was a fairly unique invention, and was first delivered in 1899. I'm very curious about any other brands that may have pre-dated this. Can you provide a reference?
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Remarkable penmanship. So wonderfully readable.
This is what we were taught in the late 50's, early '60's. "Script" then, not "cursive". Tall, lower case p's. The fancy "t" flair, ending a word, like "at".
The alphabet of upper and lower case letters adorned the top of walls of every classroom in elementary school.
Such an innocent era.
Apologies for the diversion.
Lance.
B & H Photo, which is the Heritage of photographic equipment and accessories, is one of these businesses.
"Seu cabra da peste,
"Sou Mangueira......."
That is true, but silver dollars didn't circulate much. The highest coin payments would have been half dollars.
"Cashier" machines, or machines capable of dispensing preset values in coins, were made in models that included double eagles. In 1916 the Treasury complained about their use with gold coins saying it caused unnecessary wear.
Interesting. I assume this was only for bank use? So no doubt these cashier machines were well-used, mostly by vending machine and trolley companies for counting out coins prior to rolling them, and probably by banks for accounting purposes. But the issue I have is timing. I can't find any info on these machines being available in 1895, when the OP doc was written. Was the counting machine invented and built by the mint? I guess it could be possible, though I'd expect it to have shown up in a patent.
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We don't need to presume that only the "cashier" type of coin counter was available. Simpler, single denomination machines must have been in use - or what machine did they use to count dollar coins?
See --
227,038. William C. Morrison, San Francisco, Cal. “Automatic coin-counting device.” Filed September 15, 1879. [Commissioners of Patents’ Journal. May 28, 1880. p.1391.]
Also see: The office appliance manual. 1926 for historical background.
So what you are saying is that the US Mint secretly developed a mechanical coin counting machine and deployed it years ahead of the private sector. And the only documentation of this machine is the letter in the OP. This is of course possible, given the secrecy of the mint. I'd just like to have more info on it. Sounds like an X-File. I Want to Believe.
Edited to add: I'm most interested in this because counters are the heart of the auto coin wrapping machines which were used to make bank rolls, and these counters don't show up in the patents until well into the 20th Century.
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The US Mints counted coins for bagging using wooden counting boards. They even bought the Tyler patent rights. Mints did not regularly use mechanical counters until 1934 and later. The objection was that counting machines marred coins and did not present the work of the Mints in their best light. Sub-treasuries and FRBs, however, used counting machines. (There's a photo of one in use in From Mine to Mint.)
In over 35 years as a professional numismatist, I saw a LOT of circulated silver dollars. They did circulate enough to cause all that wear.
It does seem that the quality of bright and fresh coinage was important. I've read many accounts of ladies only accepting fresh new coins from the banks. I suppose it makes sense in the age before antibiotics.
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I don't disagree, but I never saw a dollar in my dad's pay envelopes. What is the ratio of circulated to BU dollars vs Half dollars?