1 Dollar / Piastre

La Banque Nationale was chartered in 1859 and opened in Quebec City in January 1860, making this among its earliest paper issues. The bank was founded largely to serve francophone commercial interests in Lower Canada at a time when the major chartered banks — Bank of Montreal, Bank of Upper Canada — were perceived as anglophone institutions indifferent to French-Canadian merchants and agricultural traders.

The dual-denomination format, Dollar and Piastre on a single note, was a practical necessity: Quebec commercial life operated in both English and French accounting conventions simultaneously, with piastre and dollar treated as equivalent but not always interchangeable in local usage.

The "S" prefix in the Pick reference indicates this note is catalogued as a private or semi-official issue, not a government-authorized legal tender note — an important distinction for the period before Confederation.