money

BY KELLY BURGESS

E the washing machine and found dollar bills tangled in the socks or removed a couch cushion to hit a jackpot of lost quarters. Imagine, though, if your entire house was hiding a fortune just waiting to be found. Recently, big monetary nds made news in Massachusetts, where old bills were reportedly discovered in a hole in the ground (see “About at Find in Massachusetts,” page 26), and in Pennsylvania, where bags full of old coins were discovered hidden in the walls. In both cases, the original owners were said to have been people who wouldn’t trust their hard-earned pay to a bank. ink the deed to your own family’s homestead would read like a treasure map? You might be wrong— nding someone’s Mason jars full of treasure is a relatively uncommon occurrence. More likely, the treasure is the family rumor of stashed cash. But for a lucky few, tales of gold really do pan out.

Hiding money around the house was a long-established tradition for Debi Mitchell’s family. Debi, who currently resides in North Carolina, remembers her great-grandfather hiding money all over the yard. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust banks; it was that he had something bigger to hide.

“My great-grandfather was a bootlegger,” says Debi. “He did not believe in banks because he knew if he put the money in the bank, people would question where he got it.”

Mitchell’s grandfather and father continued in the

family business and also continued to bank bank in what they jokingly called the “Ditch Ban k.”

Even a er Mitchell’s father, G.W. Woolard, Jr., moved on to a more traditional career path, he never quite got out of his hiding habit. Eventually, su ering from dementia, G.W. called his daughter, frantic because he’d lost his money map. at was when Debi convinced her father that it was time to dig up the Mason jars and do something else with the money. At the time, though, she was living elsewhere and never really knew if he followed her advice. So, when she and her husband, Alan, moved to the old homestead it was in the back of her mind, especially when they landscaped the backyard.

“By the time we started working on the yard we were pretty sure Dad had put all his cash in the bank, but when we were digging up this one place, the shovel hit something and I thought to myself, ‘Wow! He really did it!’ Unfortunately, it was just an empty jar. He must have taken the money out and tossed it back in the hole.”

For Linda Ruttshaw’s great-grandfather, William Straw-ser, it was a deep distrust of banks that led him to hide money in some unusual places around his Meeker, Ohio, farmhouse.

“When I was seven, he showed me my rst hiding place, the sh bowl in the parlor,” says Linda. “He had me reach in, and sure enough under the gravel were silver half dollars. I remember they were Walking Liberty ones.”

Great-Grandpa William had good reason to bury his money in the shbowl: he was a farmer who lost everything when the local bank went under during the Great Depression. Linda has vivid memories of him warning her