SC Archives Finds Confederate-era Money No One Knew Existed

A retired USC history professor who's volunteering his time to go through boxes of Confederate-era money at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History made a surprising discovery Tuesday morning. He found five $100 bills that are so rare no one knew they existed.

"I was just thumbing through it and came across 'em," said Jack Meyer. He had just opened a bundle of bills from the Bank of South Carolina, which failed in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. The bundle had been sealed on July 9, 1880.

The state has 40 boxes of the money, all of which was supposed to have been destroyed back in the 1880s. Meyer thinks someone was lazy and just didn't do it. The boxes ended up in the basement of the Statehouse until the 1960s. They were moved to the Department of Archives in the 70s, but no one had gone through the boxes until Meyer volunteered. He's been at it for more than three years and is on only his second box.

It takes so long because it's a tedious process in which he has to separate and sort each bill. "It's 90 percent boredom and 10 percent excitement," he says of the process.

Besides finding rare bills, he's also found bills with handwriting on the back. Holding up one of them, he says, "This was a five-dollar note. 'He that takes my purse takes all I've got and not much at that.'"

And on a $50 note, someone wrote, "The last of 50,000 and this going for whiskey."

"I would love to know how he got that $50,000 in the first place and how he lost it," Meyer says. "Or did he spend it? Obviously if he's spending the last dollar on whiskey he might've been, well, spent the other $49,000 on whiskey, too. I don't know." Back in 1858 when the note was written, $50,000 would be the equivalent of more than $1.1 million today.

The state has auctioned off some of the Confederate-era bills, bringing in about $200,000 so far. All of it is required to stay with the Department of Archives but cannot be used for salaries or things like electricity bills. It must be used for preservation efforts or equipment.

Meyer says a $4 bill sold for $400. He expects the rare $100 notes he found Tuesday to sell for at least $2,000 each.

Some of the rare bills will stay at Archives, including the ones with the handwritten notes. Meyer says there's no way to know how much the contents of all 40 boxes will end up being worth since he has no idea yet what's in them.

You can learn more about the SC Dept.of Archives and History by clicking here.