About This Site

Thank you for visiting this website. It contains various types of banknotes and other pieces of ephemera from the state of Rhode Island, from colonial days to modern times. Please do not take any banknote images for your own use. If you have any questions, please contact me at collector@ricurrency.com and I will try to help.

This website consists of two different types of pages: displays of single pieces of currency and longer form profiles of banks and other types of institutions.

For the pages where a single piece of currency is displayed, the first number is the date of issue or when it was likely printed. For obsolete notes (from 1800 to the 1860s), this will be followed by a classification number starting with “RI” from James A. Haxby’s Standard Catalog Of United States Obsolete Bank Notes (1782-1866). In most cases, this will be followed by a Durand number. Roger H. Durand’s Obsolete Notes And Scrip of Rhode Island and The Providence Plantations is a definitive and instrumental work for the study of the state’s paper issues.

For banknotes from the national banking era (1863-1935), the date of the series will be followed by the Friedberg number and then the official bank charter number.

For profile pages, I have used the original name that the institution was organized under. If such enterprises were reorganized as national banks, I will note this fact in the description but not use a separate page for the bank’s currency unless that name is completely different, ie. Rocky Point Bank becoming the National Exchange Bank of Conimicut (by the way, these names are both made up).

The value of such banknotes varies wildly. Some pieces are very common and will fetch only a few dollars on eBay.

This page is under construction and will be updated with more details soon.