Winter Park’s very busy Commercial Bank was celebrating its 10th Anniversary. Bank officials were looking for a theme to promote not only the anniversary but a theme that would also attract new customers to their bank. Jerry Banks, the young president of the bank, came up with the idea that they would display recently discovered Spanish treasure that had been lying off Fort Pierce Beach since 1715. Mr. Banks surmised that people who wouldn’t bother to drop by for s routine open house just might come by to see the treasure. He decided to contact Frank Allen, one of the original finders of the coin cache, who was a personal friend of Banks as well as a customer of the bank since it opened. Arrangements were made and visitors to the bank were able to see for themselves the inspiration for songs, stories, and romance of buried treasure woven into Florida’s history.
(NOTE: The Commercial Bank from this article no longer exists. Our efforts to find out exactly what happened to it proved fruitless. But from what we were able to figure out it would appear that the bank changed its name and morphed into other banks through mergers and acquisitions.)
