⅙ Dollar 'Continental Currency' - United Colonies

The fractional Continental Currency notes of 1776 exist because the Congress needed denominations small enough for everyday transactions — the larger dollar notes were impractical for minor commerce. Hall & Sellers of Philadelphia, who also printed the Pennsylvania Gazette, produced the Continental series using a nature-printing technique pioneered in the colonies by Benjamin Franklin decades earlier: pressing actual leaves against the plate to create an inimitable texture on the reverse that counterfeiters could not easily replicate. It was a genuinely clever anti-forgery measure for the period.

Continental Currency suffered catastrophic depreciation by 1779, giving rise to the expression "not worth a Continental." The fractional denominations became functionally useless fastest, which is partly why surviving circulated examples in any condition are harder to find than the dollar values.