A New Jersey man was working on his driveway. He discovered a trove of money from the 1930s.

Rich Gilson was only expecting to work on some renovations outside of his house last Friday. 

Gilson and his wife, Suzanne Gilson, purchased a house in Wildwood, New Jersey, about four years ago, and they have been working on additions and renovations to the home during that time. 

But July 8, Gilson, a 60 year old who works in home inspections and renovations, was able to start working on the driveway at the house in the area in front of the home’s garage.  

“So I start digging. I’m hitting concrete. I’m hitting rock. I’m hitting glass,” Gilson told USA TODAY. And as he was working, he found “these two things, and they look like root balls.” 

“I throw them in the soil pile, both of them, thinking they’re just roots.”   

As he continued his work outside on Sunday, he came across one of the cylindrical objects again.  

“I pick it up, and I’m thinking what is this? Why are these things following me, right? I look at the edge, and I think ‘I can see something there.’ It looked like paper. So I started tugging at the edge, and I knew immediately what it was. I thought ‘this is money.’  

The money was wrapped in brown paper, NJ Advance Media reported. 

Gilson and his wife began pulling the cylinder apart, and it amounted to rolls of $10 and $20 bills, totaling $1,000. They later noticed that all of the dates on the bills were the same, with the cash dating back to 1934.  

That money would have been worth a lot more at the time: $1,000 in 1934 is the equivalent of more than $22,000 today when accounting for inflation, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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“So I start to think, OK, either somebody robbed a bank because all these bills came from the same lot,” Gilson said, or he believes that someone may have taken their money out of a bank during the Great Depression in the U.S.  

But that’s not the only object that Gilson discovered outside of the house. On Tuesday, he and another man he was working with spotted a roll of what he believes is more money, though he has left the object rolled up.  

Because regardless of his discoveries, Gilson told USA TODAY he isn’t going to spend the money or try to sell it.  

“It’s a great story, and if I start to tell a story and somebody says ‘can I see it?’, and I say, ‘well I bought a hoagie with it.’ That seems silly. “  

Gilson added that he’s still curious about the money’s story, where it came from and whether someone simply forgot about it.