6 1/4 Centésimos

The Banco Comercial de Corrientes was one of several provincial banks that flourished in Argentina during the prolonged period of monetary fragmentation before the country established a unified national currency. Corrientes province maintained its own banking and emission apparatus well into the 1860s, and fractional denominations like this one — expressed in centésimos rather than pesos — reflect the chronic shortage of small-denomination currency that plagued interior commerce throughout this period.

Lit. San Martín was a local Corrientes lithographer, which makes this an unusually provincial production. Most Argentine fractional notes of the era were farmed out to Buenos Aires printers at minimum.