1 Dollar

The Montreal Bank was the first chartered bank in Canada, receiving its charter in 1817 and opening for business in 1819. This note predates the formal regulation of colonial banking and circulated in an environment where public trust in paper money was fragile — counterfeiting of early Montreal Bank issues was a documented problem almost from the outset, and the bank employed increasingly elaborate hand-signed and countersigned authentication on its notes as a result.

Early Montreal Bank dollar notes from this period are among the rarest survivals of pre-Confederation Canadian private banking paper. Most were redeemed and destroyed as policy.