10 Dollars Canal Bank

The New Orleans Canal & Banking Company was chartered in 1831 primarily to finance the New Orleans Canal — a waterway intended to link the city's commercial center to Lake Pontchartrain. Banking was almost an afterthought in the original charter, but it quickly became the dominant business. The company survived the catastrophic bank suspensions of 1837–1842 that wiped out most of Louisiana's chartered banks, partly because its canal infrastructure gave it a harder asset base than the purely speculative institutions that collapsed around it.

Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson were among the most technically accomplished bank note engravers working in antebellum America, later absorbed into the American Bank Note Company in 1858 — which brackets the printing window for this note tightly.