1 Piastre = 5 Shillings

Molsons Bank, chartered in Montreal in 1855, was one of the few Canadian private banks to issue notes denominated in both piastres and shillings simultaneously — a direct response to the currency chaos of mid-19th-century British North America, where Spanish milled dollars, British sterling, and Halifax currency all circulated alongside each other with no fixed agreement on equivalence. The dual denomination on this note is a legislative artifact: Upper and Lower Canada operated under different monetary conventions, and a bank with ambitions in both provinces had to speak both languages.

The American Bank Note Company's involvement places the printing in New York, which was standard for chartered Canadian banks of this period that could not yet rely on domestic security printers of sufficient capability.