2 Shillings

The Ipswich Manufactory scheme was one of several colonial-era attempts to use paper currency tied to a productive enterprise rather than land or specie. The 1741 notes were backed — nominally — by the output of a linen manufactory, an arrangement that collapsed almost immediately when the enterprise failed to produce at anything near the scale required to support the emission.

Massachusetts had banned new private land bank emissions that same year under pressure from London, which is why these manufactory notes occupy such a strange legal position: issued just as the regulatory ground shifted beneath them. Most were redeemed under duress or simply repudiated. Survivors are rare precisely because so few circulated long enough to wear.