4 Dollars

The $4 denomination was a North American peculiarity, surviving into the 1870s largely because it corresponded conveniently to the old Halifax Currency rate — one pound Halifax equaled four dollars — giving merchants a single note that bridged the colonial monetary past with the decimal present. By 1872 this logic was already fading, and within a decade the denomination had effectively died out across Canadian chartered banking.

The Exchange Bank of Canada was incorporated in 1872 and failed spectacularly in 1873, one of several institutions caught in the credit contraction that followed the international panic of that year. Its entire note-issuing life was compressed into roughly twelve months, which makes any surviving example genuinely scarce rather than artificially so.

Canada Bank Note Printing Co. had only recently been established in Montreal as a domestic alternative to American security printers — this note falls among their earliest commercial commissions.