Ten-cent note of a state-chartered bank

A ten-cent note dated 1 July 1862, issued by the Farmers' and Manufacturers' Bank of Poughkeepsie, New York. After the federal bank was gone, the issue of notes was left to state-chartered banks, and several thousand kinds of banknote circulated side by side across the country. Notes of distant banks passed at a discount below face value, and a guide for telling counterfeits and the notes of failed banks apart — the banknote reporter — became a necessity for merchants. Banks that placed their head office somewhere remote, hard to reach for redemption, were called wildcat banks, so it is said. A small piece from the age of the forest of currencies, in which a country with no central bank met every panic bare-handed.