20 Dollars Canal Bank

The New Orleans Canal & Banking Company was chartered in 1831 primarily to finance the New Basin Canal — a infrastructure project built largely by Irish immigrant labor under brutal conditions. The bank outlasted the canal's commercial usefulness by decades, continuing to issue notes well into the Reconstruction period despite the profound disruption the Civil War brought to Louisiana's entire chartered banking system.

Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson was among the most technically accomplished bank note firms operating in antebellum America, later absorbed into the American Bank Note Company in 1858 — which neatly brackets the printer's dates given here.