50 Dollars Canal Bank

The New Orleans Canal & Banking Company was chartered in 1831 primarily to finance the New Orleans Canal — a commercial waterway connecting the city's back basin to Lake Pontchartrain. Banking was almost an afterthought in the original mandate. By the 1840s, however, the institution had become a reasonably sound commercial bank, one of the few Louisiana banks to weather the 1837 panic without permanent suspension.

Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson were among the most technically accomplished bank note engravers working in antebellum America, later absorbed into the American Bank Note Company in 1858 — which tightly brackets the printing window for notes bearing their imprint.