5 Shillings

City Bank was one of numerous Massachusetts-chartered institutions competing for commercial trust in the 1830s, a decade when American free banking culture produced an almost unmanageable proliferation of paper currency from hundreds of competing private and state-chartered banks. The New England Bank Note Company, operating out of Boston, was among the more reputable regional security printers of the period — their work appears across a wide range of New England issues from this era, though they were eventually absorbed into the consolidation that produced the American Bank Note Company in 1858.

Five-shilling denominations are an interesting survival of colonial monetary habits persisting well after U.S. independence — the denomination reflects continued public familiarity with shilling reckoning in everyday New England commerce.