5 Dollars = 25 Shillings

The Commercial Bank of the Midland District was chartered in 1832 in Upper Canada, headquartered in Kingston, and this note belongs to the period when Canadian colonial banking operated under no central authority — each chartered bank issued its own currency backed by little more than its own reputation and specie reserves. The dual denomination, dollars and shillings on the same face, reflects the genuinely chaotic monetary arithmetic of 1830s Upper Canada, where Spanish dollars, British sterling, Halifax currency, and York shillings all circulated simultaneously with no fixed consensus on exchange.

Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Co. — which reorganized as Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson sometime around 1836 — was among the most technically accomplished security printers in North America at the time, responsible for engraving a significant portion of early Canadian chartered bank paper.