4 Dollars = 20 Shillings

The Agricultural Bank of Toronto was a short-lived private institution that collapsed in 1837 during the broader wave of Upper Canadian bank failures tied to the financial panic sweeping North America that year. Notes issued in 1835 predate that collapse by only two years, meaning much of this paper never made it back to the issuing bank for redemption.

The dual denomination — four dollars expressed simultaneously as twenty shillings — reflects the currency confusion still endemic to Upper Canada in the 1830s, where British sterling units and the dollar of American commerce competed in daily trade. Issuers had to speak both languages to be trusted.

Pick lists this as P#1559, placing it among the largely unresearched corpus of pre-Confederation Canadian chartered and private bank issues.