Well, this page from the August 23, 1963 Lorain Journal has the story of Pop Altman, a man from Troy, Ohio, who distrusted banks so much, he preferred to bury his money in the ground for safekeeping. More specifically, he buried it in huge milk cans at his Miami County feed mill plant beginning in the 1930s.
On his death bed in late July 1963, he told his son and daughter about the buried money. Two 10-gallon cans with $350,000 in small bills were unearthed shortly thereafter; the article above notes that another milk can with an additional $150,000 had just been found.
Elsewhere on the page: the U. S. Post Office on Broadway gets spruced up; the "By George" column offers some whimsical advice; the Delis family (including the owners of Delis Furniture) has a visitor from Greece, who offers up an interesting view of life there; and Governor Jim Rhodes and Patricia Lei Anderson, Miss Hawaii of 1962, open up the Ohio State Fair (which seems pretty late compared to the current schedule).
5 comments:
Miss Hawaii? What's not to like? Interesting that her middle name is "Lei".
Story reminds me of Bill Gurnhill who, in April of 1901, found a buried wooden cask while fixing the foundation of his barn on his property at what are now Whitney and Indian Hollow Roads.
Instead of money, it was full of human bones!
They never did figure out who it was.
That's a great deal of cash to bury in milk cans - equal to about $5 million today. There was a lot of money to be made in the feed mill business, apparently.
My grandfather had some money that he kept at his house.Mostly coins inside of little burlap bags.He had about 3 bags the size of 10 pound potato sacks.I got to look inside a bag once and it was chock full of Mercury dimes,Buffalo nickels and lots of silver dollars.Real silver dollars.It all looked so beautiful.My grandfather lived through the depression and didn't trust banks as alot of people didn't.I remember my father saying that my grandfather would work all day for a quarter sometimes as money was tight.Seeing those money bags always reminded of "The Good,The Bad and The Ugly" when they went searching for that lost Confederate gold treasure that was buried in an unmarked grave.
Anon:
My grandfather (1877-1954) was a thrifty man with a small summertime business renting boats and selling bait. After he died, in the back of his shop, the family found several gallon buckets full of coins, all separated by denomination. Dad said all were still good except the bottom half and outside edge of the pennies, which in contact with the steel pail had electro-galvanized themselves into a green goo. "We counted coins for weeks."
And I had a friend, single, a big shot at NASDAQ, who passed away suddenly a couple years back. His apartment was full of cash. Hey, there's an envelope in a desk drawer. Oh, there's 7,000 bucks in it. Here's another. 5-thou in that one. Suit in the closet with pockets stuff with hundreds, that kind of stuff. It was startling. He had buckets of Las Vegas betting tokens. One of his family took a trip there and cashed in enough to pay for his airfare and nice, little vacation. Sort of amazing.
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