The Sun Journal featured a long article on Maine-made money (April 17). I don’t know how correctly it reported the information about the details of paper money issued by banks in Maine, but I have little confidence in its accuracy since the author, apparently relying on the word of appraiser Larry Corbett, got some very basic things wrong.

The Federal Reserve did not control the printing of paper money by banks from “1860 ’til the 1930s,” since the Federal Reserve did not operate until 1914. The U.S. had a central bank for some of the 19th century (the First Bank of the United States, 1791-1811, and the Second Bank of the United States, 1816-1836) and those did some regulation when they existed, but not between 1860 and 1914.

The issuance of “greenbacks” to finance the Civil War is another matter, but not relevant to the Sun Journal article.

Perhaps some basic fact-checking would be good policy when publishing supposedly informational articles.

Neil Garston, Lewiston