5 Piastres

The Banque d'Hochelaga was a French-Canadian chartered bank founded in Montreal in 1873, and by 1911 it was one of the more aggressive regional competitors to the established English-Canadian banking houses. It survived intact through the pre-war period before eventually merging into what became the Banque Canadienne Nationale in 1924.

American Bank Note Company's Ottawa plant — established specifically to handle Canadian chartered bank business — produced this note. The "5 Piastres" denomination wording is the detail worth pausing on: Quebec-based banks continued using "piastres" in their French-language text long after the term had effectively vanished from English-Canadian usage, a linguistic holdout with no monetary significance but considerable cultural stubbornness behind it.