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1 Pound 1 Shilling 5 Dollars, Dominion of Canada
| Issuer | Merchants Bank of Halifax |
|---|---|
| Year | 1880 |
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| Printer | American Bank Note Company |
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| Obverse description | Green print with brown underprint and blue overprint. The central vignette presents a sailing ship, flanked by a female figure with distaff at left and a bank building vignette at right. Overprinted denomination values appear at upper left and right, with two lines of overprinted text at centre identifying the issuing agency and exchange obligation. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
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| Reverse lettering | THE MERCHANT'S BANK OF HALIFAX ONE POUND ONE SHILLING STERLING AT BERMUDA. FIVE 5 |
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| Comments |
The Merchants Bank of Halifax — renamed the Merchants Bank of Canada in 1868, though some earlier plate designs persisted in use — issued this note in a dual-denomination format serving both British sterling and decimal dollar users simultaneously. The 1 pound 1 shilling / 5 dollar equivalence reflects the fixed exchange rate of £1 = $4.86⅔ that governed Canadian commercial banking before full decimalization took hold in practice.
By 1880, the bank was already expanding aggressively into central Canada, which would ultimately overextend it. It collapsed in 1922 — absorbed by the Bank of Montreal — one of the more significant private bank failures of the early twentieth century.