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[[underlined]]U.S. Currency Collection[[/underlined]]

The Secretary reported that officials of the Department of the Treasury have recently informed us that they would be pleased to transfer to the Smithsonian a collection of 792 notes, representing a type set of all U.S. paper currency issued since 1861. The face value of these notes, including fractional currency, is $133,965.79. In addition, the Treasury would be happy to transfer at the same time eight notes of each of the denominations ($100, $1,000, $10,000, $100,000) of 1934 gold certificates. All other copies of these certificates, which have never been released for general circulation but were used to effect transfers between Federal Reserve Banks, are to be destroyed by the Department. The face value of this second set of notes is $888,800. The combined numismatic value of these two collections is inestimably high and their addition to the Smithsonian's numismatic collections would be extremely welcome.

In return for giving us these two collections, the Treasury would require that the Smithsonian agree to meet three conditions: that it provide access to the notes on those rare occasions when Treasury officials may have to study them in the course of settling a claim for mutilated currency; that it promise never to present these notes to the Treasury for redemption; and that it reimburse the Treasury if any of the notes is ever stolen from the Smithsonian and subsequently redeemed by the Treasury.