Higgins Museum of National Bank Notes

For much of American history there was no single national paper currency the way there is today. During the Civil War era the federal government created a system of national banks, and those banks were allowed to issue their own paper notes, printed with the bank's name and hometown but standardized and backed by government bonds. A dollar in your pocket might read the name of a bank in a town you had never heard of.

Thousands of banks in towns large and small took part, so the surviving notes form a remarkable map of the country, a piece of paper money for nearly every place with a bank. The system wound down in the 1930s as the modern uniform currency took over. The Higgins Museum gathers these notes and, through them, tells the story of how ordinary money worked in an America that looked very different from today.

The museum grew from the collection of Dr. William Higgins, a dentist whose fascination with national bank notes grew into a serious and wide-ranging collection. Rather than let it disappear into private hands, he established a museum to preserve and share it, choosing Okoboji, a place he loved, as its home.

That origin gives the museum the feel of a labor of love, the kind of deeply knowledgeable, single-subject institution that America is quietly full of, built by one person's devotion to a niche few others noticed. It welcomes serious numismatists and curious vacationers alike, and its staff and displays make the subject approachable even for people who have never thought twice about where their money comes from.

Practically speaking, the museum is a perfect change of pace in a region built around summer on the water. When the lakes are crowded or the weather turns, or when you simply want an hour of history, the Higgins offers a cool, quiet, and genuinely interesting stop just off the lakeshore in Okoboji.

It sits within easy reach of the beaches, the amusement park, and the resort towns of the Iowa Great Lakes, so it fits neatly into a lake-country visit. Few travelers arrive in Okoboji expecting a museum of paper money, which is exactly why so many leave delighted to have found one.

The museum sits in the Iowa Great Lakes, a cluster of glacial lakes in the state's northwest corner that form Iowa's premier summer playground. West Okoboji, the nearest, is a deep, clear, spring-fed blue-water lake, one of the few of its kind, carved by the same glaciers that shaped this pocket of lakes and marshes so unlike the flat farmland around it.

The region lies within the historic homelands of the Dakota, whose peoples lived across these lakeshores, prairies, and wetlands long before the resort towns rose. The surrounding prairie pothole country, a landscape of shallow marshes left by the glaciers, remains a vital haven for migrating waterfowl, giving the area a natural richness beyond its summer bustle.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.