We flew down to Florida the weekend before the big show to escape the cold of New England. We were well greeted by days that were mostly in the low 80s! Joining long time friends in a town outside of Orlando, we caught up with current goings on and prepared for the show. The first order of business was to register ahead of the crowd and look over the fairly extensive offering of Confederate notes.
We set up at John Herzog's Wall Street Bourse show at the Museum of American Finance Thursday, October 18 through Saturday October 20, 2012. This is a small show held at a historic venue in downtown New York City on Wall Street itself. It's essentially the old Strasburg, PA show recreated in a Wall St session complete with all of the social and fun activities that John's shows are known for.
Here we are... T-27 remains the rarest.
We'll finish our blog series with the diagnostics published in "Identification of Series of 1882 and 1902 National Bank Replacement Notes Printed in the 1903-1915 Period" by R. Shawn Hewitt and Peter Huntoon. SPMC members can read the article here.
Diagnostics
National bank notes meeting the following criteria are replacement notes printed after the general conversion to new style fonts (circa September 1903):
Once I discovered a replacement 1902 Plain Back, I realized that there should exist replacement 1882 Value Backs of the same style. An earlier look through the NBN Census (www.nbncensus.com) revealed exactly zero hits, but I did get lucky while searching through the Heritage archives (www.ha.com). There I found two replacements.
In our article, Peter Huntoon and I call 1915 the end of the era when old style font presses were used to make up replacement sheets of nationals. At the time it was written, we had not found a single Plain Back replacement. That has changed, but the picture is somewhat fuzzy.
Series 1882 Date Back replacements are very scarce. Of the 1700 or so listed in the Heritage Archives (which has some duplication) and the 1100 imaged notes in the NBN Census (which includes a certain amount of overlap with the Heritage archives), I have been able to locate only four replacement notes. Here are the statistics for this type:
I would have to say that Date Backs (both 1882 and 1902) are my favorite types of large size replacement nationals. That’s because as replacements they’re scarcer than most other types, yet they’re less expensively priced compared to other types when they come up for sale. Further, there is no ambiguity about when you find one with the old style font. Recall that for Red Seals and Brown Backs, the earliest of those used the old style serial number fonts, and you need to do a little homework to determine the date of printing. By contrast, any Date Back with the old st
Brown Backs are among the more difficult types to be found as replacement notes. Here is why. Recall that #1 notes by far constitute the largest percentage of surviving replacement notes. They were the most apt to be misprinted or damaged, and needed to be replaced before shipping to their destination banks. While #1 Brown Backs are plentiful from the pre-1902 era, very few exist from 1903 to 1908, when they were discontinued. Any new banks that formed after 1902 (which would require notes starting with #1) would be of the third charter style, namely Red Seals.
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