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5 Dollars Bank of Milledgeville - Georgia
| Issuer | Bank of Milledgeville |
|---|---|
| Year | 1854 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | The central field carries the bank title and promise-to-pay text in intaglio engraving, flanked by an upper-center allegorical vignette of Commerce gazing seaward, a lower-left pastoral vignette of a seated woman with a cow and a church in the background, and a lower-right vignette of a blacksmith at his forge. The note is dated Milledgeville, Georgia, May 1, 1854, and bears the legal notice that stockholders are personally liable, a provision standard to antebellum Georgia state-chartered banks. The imprint of Toppan, Carpenter, Casilear & Co., New York appears in the lower margin. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Toppan, Carpenter, Casilear & Co New York THE BANK OF MILLEDGEVILLE Will pay FIVE DOLLARS to Bearer on demand. Milledgeville Geo. May 1 1854 _________Cash.r _________ Pres.t STOCKHOLDERS PERSONALLY LIABLE |
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| Comments |
The Bank of Milledgeville operated out of Georgia's then-state capital, a town whose political weight far exceeded its modest size. Toppan, Carpenter, Casilear & Co. — one of the dominant American bank note printers of the antebellum period, later absorbed into the American Bank Note Company in 1858 — produced notes of consistently high engraving quality, and this issue is no exception to that house standard.
Milledgeville lost its capital status to Atlanta in 1868, and the bank itself did not survive the Civil War's financial wreckage. Notes from this 1854 series are genuinely pre-war artifacts from an institution that had fewer than a decade of remaining life when these were printed.