5 Dollars

The Merchants Bank of Halifax was a Nova Scotia institution that punched considerably above its regional weight — by the 1880s it had branches stretching into Ontario and Quebec, making this note genuinely transregional in circulation rather than a purely Maritime issue. The American Bank Note Company in New York handled the printing, as it did for the majority of Canadian chartered bank notes of this period; Halifax-based issuers rarely had the volume to justify domestic security printing arrangements.

The bank was absorbed by the Royal Bank of Canada in 1901, which terminated the note's legal status. Unredeemed survivors entered the collector market slowly over the following decades.