Following is the daily “Profile America” feature from the U.S. Census Bureau:
FIRST U.S. BANK ROBBERY
Profile America — Sunday, March 19th. Banks had operated in America for about a half century before someone tried to make an unauthorized withdrawal. On this date in 1831, Edward Smith committed the first bank robbery in the U.S. — hitting the City Bank on New York’s Wall Street. He entered the bank after it closed, using a duplicate set of keys, and got away with $245,000 — a huge sum at the time. By various calculations, that would be worth from $5.6 million to $6.8 million today. But he was caught, convicted and spent five years in New York’s Sing-Sing Prison. Now, across the nation, there are over 93,000 commercial banking establishments. As one 20th century bank robber supposedly noted, that’s where the money is — bank deposits total nearly $13 trillion. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online at www.census.gov.
Sources: Kane’s Famous First Facts, 2773
The crime/accessed 1/12/2017: http://americasbesthistory.com/abhtimeline1830.html
Inflation calculator/lower figure: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi
Inflation calculator/higher figure: http://www.davemanuel.com/inflation-calculator.php
Banking establishments/County Business Patterns/NAICS 522110:
https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/BP/2014/00A1//naics~522110
Bank deposits/page 10/table III-A/accessed 1/12/2017: https://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/qbp/timeseries/BalanceSheet.xls
Profile America is produced by the Center for New Media and Promotion of the U.S. Census Bureau. Statistics and accounts drawn from cited non-Census sources are employed for illustrative or narrative purposes, and are not attested to by the U.S. Census Bureau. These daily features are available as produced segments, ready to air, on the Internet at http://www.census.gov (look for “Audio” in the “Library” pull-down menu).
SOURCE U.S. Census Bureau
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Photo credit: jimmywayne via Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-ND
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