Nice find. All US federal reserve notes or Treasury notes are obligations of the Treasury or Fed etc, and thus technically legal tender (apart from any collector value, which may be significant) although it would be difficult to maybe find someone to take them because they are so different in appearance as well. Nice problem to have.
I read an apocryphal tale years ago online, about a guy whose friend was tearing down an old farmhouse. He ran into him in the parking lot of a convenience store, the guy summoned him to his car, opened the trunk and said he had an absolutely huge stash of cash that he’d found inside a wall. Said the guy drove away and never saw or heard from him again.
The older notes “horse blankets” issued by individual banks would have collector value but I don’t believe they could be spent at face value. The Federal notes were standardized in their current size in 1914 and all of them afaik are technically spendable. It would be “fun” to spend them at one level, or pay debts especially, just on general principles.
Silver certificates have an interesting history. By the early 1960s the spot price of silver approached $1.29, the point where it became a loss for the government to redeem certificates for silver dollars, stored in large hoards in banks across the country. Lavere Redfield was one character who didn’t trust banks and drove around the country cashing in currency for mint bags of silver dollars. He would then drop them down a coal chute behind a false wall in his basement, accumulating over $100,000, and were sold for years to collectors.
It became profitable to convert currency for the silver dollars based on their collector value because no attempt was made by banks or government to account for special collector value, a kind of arbitrage. Eventually the government ran out of silver dollars to exchange and was reduced to providing 1 oz bags of silver shot, and finally repudiated the silver certificates altogether by 1968. Their were some GSA auctions of remaining government hoards of Carson City, NV coins.
Large denomination notes ($500 and $1000, $5000 etc) ceased production in the 1940s and were withdrawn as they came into member banks by the late 1960s as part of “drug trafficing” efforts although they are not technically unlawful to spend. They have considerable collector value and trade at a premium to their face value, i.e. a $500 note in decent condition may cost $600 or $700 to purchase.
When those notes in the OP were stashed, $20 had considerable purchasing power, equivalent to factor of ten compared with today roughly. It would be interesting to know the story of what happened.
