50 Centavos Fuertes

The Banco Argentino of Concordia was one of several provincial Argentine banks that turned to the American Bank Note Company in New York during the 1860s, a common arrangement given the near-total absence of quality intaglio printing capacity in Argentina at the time. Concordia sits in Entre Ríos province, on the Uruguayan border — a commercially active river port whose local bank required fractional notes to facilitate everyday trade that federal currency wasn't reliably supplying.

The "Fuertes" designation distinguished these notes from the depreciated paper pesos then circulating, pegging the denomination to the harder peso fuerte standard. Whether that peg held in practice was another matter entirely.