5 Dollars

The Bank of Nova Scotia was still a young regional institution when this note was issued — chartered only in 1832, it had spent its first decades confined to Halifax before beginning its slow westward expansion across Canada. The 1881 series predates the bank's later imperial ambitions in the Caribbean by roughly two decades.

American Bank Note Company's New York facility handled virtually all of the major Canadian chartered bank printing during this period, giving notes from competing banks an often-identical quality of steel engraving. The technical execution is ABNC at its peak output years.