1 Pound 1 Shilling 5 Dollars, Dominion of Canada

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.