Survival of National Bank Notes
When collectors look at their notes, they rarely wonder about the odds against the likelihood that their notes survived! They have ‘em, so that is that.
Everyone has a general sense that the older the note, the rarer it is, mainly because they had to pay more for it.
It is also obvious that notes from the banks with small circulations are scarcer than those from the big city banks.
When John Hickman and I discussed survivability back in the 1970s and 1980s, he stated flat out that if the note was issued before 1924, it constituted a miracle of survival.
The fact is that once a note went out the door of a bank into circulation, that was its death knell. It was going
