The SilverTowne Vault Blog

100 Greatest American Currency Notes Series: Series of 1918 $500 Federal Reserve Note

Published 04/30/2026

From an issue estimate of “several hundred thousand” to just a couple hundred known, this next entry in our blog series covering the 100 Greatest American Currency Notes showcases the Federal Reserve Banks. Authors of the Whitman publication, Q. David Bowers and David M. Sundman, take us through the role they served in higher denomination notes.

#89 – Series of 1918 $500 Federal Reserve Note

A portrait of John Marshall is the center of the $500 note from the Series 1918. The back features the vignette DeSoto Discovering the Mississippi in 1541. Around 200 notes are known to still exist representing the different Federal Reserve Banks and showcasing the different Treasury signature combinations. Those combinations are Burke-Glass, Burke-Houston, and White-Mellon. Various districts used different letters to distinguish which bank it came from. For example, Boston...read more