NEWS

Note: Photo available; see below

By L.J. TOLER
UNC-CH News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- A Lazy Two bill from the Fayetteville National Bank, with an engraved scene of "Sir Walter Raleigh Exhibiting Corn and Tobacco to the English," will be among antique currencies in an upcoming exhibit at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"Hard Cash & Hard Times: A History of North Carolina Currency" also will feature gold coins minted by a Rutherford County family during the first U.S. gold rush -- in North Carolina in the 1830s and 1840s -- and polished shell bead money -- wampum -- used by Native Americans and some European colonists during the 1600s and early 1700s.

The university’s North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library has drawn on its nearly 3,000 coins and 6,000 paper notes to create the exhibit, free and open to the public in the collection’s gallery from Wednesday (Nov. 4) through May 31, 1999. Hours will be 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays and 1-5 p.m. Sundays. For information, call 962-1172.

The exhibit opening at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday will precede a reception and a 5:30 p.m. talk on North Carolina currency by Dr. Richard Doty, the Smithsonian Institution’s curator of numismatics (study or collection of money). To register for Doty’s free talk, call Friends of the Library, cosponsor of the event with the North Carolina Collection, at 962-1301.

The exhibit’s 150 pieces of currency, produced by or for North Carolina from the early 1700s to the beginning of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, will be complemented by selections from currency-related books, period newspaper accounts and other imprints from the North Carolina Collection. The collection includes more than 120,000 books and 78,000 pamphlets, plus newspapers, journals, maps, broadsides, photographs, audiovisuals and other materials, that illustrate four centuries of the colony and state.

Among jewels from the collection that accompany the new currency exhibit:

When former North Carolina Governor Benjamin Smith died in debtor’s prison in 1826, his friends hurriedly buried his corpse to prevent Smith’s creditors from seizing it. At that time, it was neither uncommon nor illegal for creditors to claim and hold a body until friends and relatives paid the debts of the deceased.

The first money produced for the Confederate States of America in 1861 was printed by New York engravers and smuggled into the South.

In 1863, a mob of women in Salisbury, angered by prices a local merchant charged for flour, chopped down the front door to his store. The hatchet-wielding ladies convinced the merchant to lower the price.

In 1874, a U.S. Congressional committee documented that the average annual income for a family of seven in Tarboro was $728, of which $4 a year were paid in taxes.

The exhibit conveys money’s impact on the state’s history and our ancestors, say Neil Fulghum and Laura Baxley, keeper and assistant keeper, respectively, of the North Carolina Collection Gallery.

The nation’s monetary supply didn’t begin to centralize and stabilize under the federal government until after the Civil War, they say. Before that, states used money issued by public officials, banks, colonial and state governments, insurance companies, businesses and even individuals.

During the North Carolina gold rush, a Bechtler family in Rutherford County operated a private mint and made gold coins for miners who were unearthing gold dust, ore and nuggets worth millions of dollars. Twenty-four such coins, which Herman Bernard of High Point donated to UNC-CH in 1979, will be part of the "Hard Cash" exhibit.

So will 17 items borrowed from the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh and the wampum, called roanoke and peak, borrowed from UNC-CH anthropology research labs.

Since the 1960s, the North Carolina Collection has cared for the university library’s currency collection, Fulghum said. The currency collection began in 1942, when Alexander Andrews of Fayetteville, an 1893 alumnus, gave the library several thousand specimens of Civil War currency. Over the years, other alumni and friends have donated old money. And occasionally, library personnel have found obsolete shillings or notes tucked between pages of old books.

"The resulting collection ranges in type from classical Greek and Roman coins to a sweeping array of 20th-century foreign notes," Fulghum said. "The bulk of the collection, however, is formed of Confederate issues and North Carolina currencies."

The North Carolina Collection’s World Wide Web address is www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/.

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Note to media: A photo is available on prints or a disk. Call Dan Sears, News Services photographer, at 919-962-8592.

N.C. Collection Gallery contacts: Laura Baxley, Neil Fulghum, 919-962-1172