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10 Dollars
| Issuer | Merchants Bank of Canada, Montreal |
|---|---|
| Year | 1886 |
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| Composition | Cotton paper |
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| Obverse description | The obverse is printed in dark green and black intaglio on plain paper, with a central vignette of the Merchants Bank head office building in Montreal rendered in fine engraved detail. To the left stands a vignette of a seated mariner at a ship's wheel, while to the right appears a portrait of Sir Hugh Allan, president of the bank. Large numeral counters '10' are positioned at both left and right extremities, and the serial number appears twice in the upper portion of the note. A handwritten date of 2nd July 1886 and the payable location 'Montreal' appear in manuscript, with printed promise-to-pay text above the lower inscription 'TEN DOLLARS' in bold letterpress. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | THE MERCHANTS BANK OF CANADA TEN DOLLARS Pay Dollars Montreal COUNTERSIGNED PRESIDENT |
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| Comments |
The Merchants Bank of Canada was among the more aggressive commercial lenders in late nineteenth-century Canada, and its 1886 issues came at a period of genuine institutional confidence — the bank had survived the post-Confederation consolidation years and was expanding branch operations westward. The British American Bank Note Company, established in Ottawa in 1866 and later relocating production to Montreal, had by this point secured a dominant position in Canadian chartered bank printing, and their engraving work of this decade is technically among their strongest.
The bank itself did not survive indefinitely — it was absorbed by the Bank of Montreal in 1922 after a prolonged deterioration in its loan portfolio following the First World War. Notes from the 1886 series had long since left circulation by then, making surviving examples genuinely old paper by Canadian standards.