This old man, photographed in the early 1920s, is hauling a wheelbarrow full of mutilated currency to the ‘death chamber’ at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, where it will be destroyed.

The photo caption says he has been doing this work for fifty years.

If this is correct, then he would have joined the Bureau in the 1870s, when it was still a young Treasury Department agency.

Congress created the Bureau in the early days of the Civil War, when it became clear that the federal government did not have enough gold and silver on hand to pay for the war.

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