1 Dollar State Bank of Michigan

The State Bank of Michigan had a brief and troubled existence — Michigan's free banking legislation of the 1830s had already produced one spectacular collapse, and by the time this note was issued in 1859, the state was operating under far tighter regulatory controls introduced after that earlier debacle. The American Bank Note Company had by this point consolidated much of the private bank note printing business in the United States, absorbing several rival firms in 1858, making this note among the earliest issues to emerge from that newly merged operation.

Proportion protection was a relatively primitive security measure, essentially a mathematical relationship between printed elements intended to defeat alteration of the denomination — a genuine concern when note-alterers routinely raised 1s to higher values.