6 1/4 Cents Huntingdon, Cambria and Indiana Turnpike Road Company

Murray, Draper, Fairman & Co. were among the most technically accomplished bank note engravers working in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia, and their involvement here is slightly incongruous — this is road-company scrip, not a bank note, issued to solve a chronic small-change shortage in the Pennsylvania interior. The 6¼-cent denomination is itself a fractional artifact of the old Spanish real system: one real equaled 12½ cents, so this note is exactly half a real.

Turnpike companies in Pennsylvania routinely issued scrip during this period when coined small change was simply unavailable along their routes. Whether it circulated beyond the immediate road corridor is doubtful.