Last Friday I stopped at the local convenience store and discovered, mixed in the change from my $20 a strange bill. It is a 1934 $10 Silver Certificate. It’s in decent shape, like it was used a couple times and then put away. I live in a semi-rural area of Illinois so I think some local farmer received it ages ago and stuffed it in his mattress and now they are dropping them back in circulation.
Since it says on the bill that I could exchange it for an equal amount in silver, I was wondering if that is still allowable. Also, is this bill worth more than the $10 face value? Any info would be appreciated from the numismatists out there.
http://www.coinsite.com/content/faq/small_size_arcert.asp
If samclem pops in he can give an expert’s perspective, though.
We currently buy $1 silver certs in average condition for $1.50, the $5 certs for $8 and the $10 certs for $18.
More likely some poor farmer had his coin and currency collection burglarized, and the thieves are spending it at face value. Happens all the time.
In the good 'ol days, did people frequently take their silver certificates, go to the appropriate government agency, and actually redeem them for silver?
Only in 1968. You could get about $1.70 or so for a $1 paper dollar. That’s my memory.
Possibly somebody has given an old collection to a kid
I have swamped the local kids market with coins from 1800
- my guess is somebody is clearing their basement.
Why would you do this? Virtually any US coin that I’m aware of from 1800 is worth quite a bit above face value.
It is hassle, dealers are scum, messing around on EBay is a PITA
If you are like me, a hoarder/collector, then the actual value is not very interesting, but you want to pass them on to someone who’ll get some pleasure from them.
Clearing out is painful and things often have very little value if you have to sell them.
Well, anything is possible, I still say it’s more likely that the coins were stolen, and are being spent at face. Mom saved a dozen or so '64 Kennedy half-dollars, but my brother spent them on candy and sodas in the 70’s sometime. They aren’t “worth” a whole lot, but considerably more than .50c. I think I still have one somewhere. I really liked the walking liberty design much better. The Ben Franklin design that replaced it was pretty ghastly, I’d say.
I read somewhere that when redemption of the silver certs began in earnest, treasury stopped paying out the old silver dollars and resorted to silver “shot”, which I assume has no numismatic premium. For a brief period, one could go to the Treasury building during certain days, during a brief window of hours, and purchase/obtain silver dollars in large quantities. Even then, they had quite a numismatic premium over face value. Arbitrage at its finest. Later, the government got at least half-way smart and ended that kind of thing.
Bummer, that. We had $98 face falue of pre-1965 silver in a sack, which my brother years later admitted to pilfering, and presumably spending at face value. I think there’s about $30 in the sack now.
A little over a year ago I started an MPSIMS thread about this very topic: “Payable on demand, eh?” 
Interesting. My oldest son found my wife’s stash of Kennedy halves, two-dollar bills and bicentennial quarters and spent nearly all of it playing arcade games and in vending machines. Hoo boy, was she pissed!
I remember when I was a kid and several of us were trying to come up with money for the local soda fountain (yes, I’m that old). One of the gang told us to wait and headed home. Upon return, he opened his hand to reveal several large silver coins. I’ve been collecting off and on since childhood and immediately recognized these as being something old. I asked to look at them and damned if they were not only Morgan Dollars, but of the Carson City variety. I told him that he’d better take them back home before his father found out, but we went and spent them anyway. We didn’t see him for a month.
That’s correct. Originally, silver certificates could be redeemed either for silver dollars or silver bullion. For a long time, the price of silver was low enough that nobody did much of either.
A silver dollar contains 0.77 ounces of silver, so the market price has to rise to $1.29 per ounce before the specie becomes worth more than the face value of the bill or coin. In 1963, the price did reach that value, and redemption began in earnest.
From a redeemer’s standpoint, you were better off getting silver dollars than silver shot. The silver dollars had a face value, putting a floor under your losses–if silver tanked, they were still worth a dollar. Silver shot, of course, might go arbitrarily low.
In March 1964, the Treasury wised up to this and discontinued redemption of silver certificates in coin. If they were going to lose money, they were at least going to avoid the expense of minting coins, and force redeemers to take their chances with silver shot.
Later in the 1960’s, the price of silver skyrocketed, and even shot looked attractive. There was another run on the Treasury, and silver certificates suffered the fate of all specie-backed currency: when redemption becomes too expensive, the government suspends redemption.
With silver currently going for just over $12/oz, the redemption value of the OP’s $10 silver certificate would thus be around $93 - if the Govt. hadn’t welshed on their redemption promise. It’s probably not smart to bet with the guy who makes the rules.