1771 North Carolina duck note. An example of the dumpster fire that was NC Colonial money

If the other day I showed you an example of the gold standard when it came to Colonial money, in the form of a Maryland note, today I will be doing the opposite....North Carolina Colonial currency was an absolute dumpster fire.

They started out terrible by producing handwritten notes for the first 20 plus years. Counterfeiting was so bad, and the colony knew it, but it took them more than 20 years to address the problem and get an actual printer to make their notes.



And even when they switched to printing their notes, as you can see from mine, security was never a priority. Even by Colonial era money standards, that's a pretty lazy attempt at a secure paper currency.

A duck might look cool, but it ain't much security if a 10 year old can make a close copy of it. They did try other symbols but the efforts were always...basic.

Add to that the bad habits of occasionally overprinting, and also "redeeming" notes and instead of destroying them, sneaking around the public's back and re-releasing the old notes into circulation, and yeah, you see the problem.

In colonial America if someone walked into your store in North Carolina and pulled out one of these, you were not going to give them face value in goods, or anywhere near close. If you were feeling generous you might let them walk out with goods worth half the value of that note. But that's because you knew that your colonial government was shifty and abused their money making and distribution authority.

It also didn't help that unlike many other colonies, to Counterfeit was not death in North Carolina. A counterfeiter would just loose an ear... And many a counterfeiter thought that that was a good deal and applied their trade in North Carolina with gusto.

 

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It’s so satisfying to have a note, a piece of history from 1771 that has an EPQ and a high grade.

 

I often wonder how it's even possible... no airconditioning... two major wars... what the heck happened to keep this in crisp sharp? Time travel is the only explanation.

 

Most likely with a lot of these surviving notes a family of some means got them fresh, and didn't redeem all of them, and after a while it became a souvenir. My guess is a lot of the crispy non-folded ones probably spent a lot of time inside a family bible made with good quality paper.

Just because paper is old doesn't necessarily mean it has to degrade. Paper is fragile, but if not used and not stored poorly, it will keep. I have books dating back to the 1920s that are crispy and look like they could have been printed yesterday. Probably spent decades in the library of a well-off home, never read, and never really saw any wear. Were never put in a poorly ventilated or humid storage room where bugs and a bad environment can break them down, etc. And if the paper was good quality paper, then there's no need for it to just randomly degrade. As long as the place was cleaned and maintained, and bugs weren't allowed to just roam around, it will keep.

I also have copper plate prints from the 1600s that look like they could have been made a week ago.

I also remember a research library at a university I was enrolled in that had books dating back 140+ years, and you could tell which books never saw much interest, because I once checked out a book on the history of American diplomatic relations with South America that was from the 1890s that probably had only been checked out half a dozen times during the last 110+ years, and the book looked like it could have been printed a year or two before at most.

 

Actually as a North Carolina note it is pretty scarce in that condition, the great majority were poorly stored in an archives and are in miserable shape. I've seen lots in Stacks and Heritage auctions of sometimes hundreds of notes in various advanced states of decomposition.