In addition to gold and silver, the vault used to hold many other strange treasures including "paintings, prints and photographs, furniture, decorative arts, sculpture, and architectural fragments."

A pioneering female journalist named Emily Edson Briggs got a look inside in 1870 and reported on discovering several forgotten items including a bottle of rose oil (sent to Martin Van Buren by an Indian prince), hundreds of jewels, a snuff box, counterfeit coins and dies, and a hoard of Confederate currency.

By 1897 the Rogers vault had fallen into disrepair, and a Congressional inquiry blasted it as "a disgrace to the government and of such obsolete character and inferiority of construction and minimum of security as would cause them to be rejected as unfit for use by any country bank in a backwoods town." The Congressional report highlighted the Treasury guards as the vault's most effective defense.

The Rogers vault was replaced by a larger cash room in 1909 under the Department's south plaza. The newer subterranean space had double-story shelving, similar to library stacks. According to the Washington Post, the only way to get in was "by way of a tiny hydraulic elevator, which is protected by an iron door, opening almost at the elbow of the chief of the division of issues, who keeps the key in his desk."

Contemporary newspaper articles fawned over an advanced-for-the-time alarm system. The walls of the room were lined with a dense mesh of wires that, if disturbed from the outside, would send an electronic alert to a nearby guard station. The alarm would also activate if the connection between the guard post and vault were interrupted. The alarm 'checked in' with the guard post every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day.