Broken Bank Notes from a Buried Town
Editor’s Note: For nearly 70 years, the feature-rich pages of Coins magazine, Numismatic News’ venerable sister publication, have tracked the history, fun and the growth of this great hobby, while also attracting new collectors to pursue what was once deemed the “hobby of kings.” Dusting off these time-aged issues, from the early 1960s and beyond, each installment of “Past Times with Coins,” written by its former longtime editor, explores what nuggets of interest they contain.
It’s been called Michigan’s Pompeii, after the ancient Roman city buried in the ashes of the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. Only in Michigan’s case it was sand that washed over the remains of a once-prosperous lumber city, Singapore, near Lake Michigan in Allegan County – still known to collectors not only because of its strange past but also its rare broken bank notes.
