100 Dollars Small-Size National Bank Note

The 1929 Series National Bank Notes were the Federal Reserve's solution to a logistical nightmare: hundreds of individual national banks had been issuing their own large-format notes in competing designs for decades, creating a verification burden for merchants and bank tellers alike. The shift to small-size standardized format in 1929 effectively ended the era of visually distinct regional bank paper — every issuing institution, from major city clearinghouses to one-branch prairie banks, now printed on identical BEP plates with only the bank name, charter number, and officer signatures differentiating one note from another.

Two officer signatures were required — the bank's president and cashier — making each note technically unique to its issuing institution. Banks with low charter numbers, small towns, or short operational histories before the national bank system's 1935 wind-down tend to command serious collector premiums today, irrespective of grade.