"Four pages from the publication Thompson's Bank Note Reporter, issued in February 1846, give a sense of the wide range of currencies available in the United States during the so-called free banking era. (The full 16-page issue, which covers currency from 27 states, D.C., and Canada, is available on the Internet Archive, having been digitized by Washington University Libraries.) "Thompson's Reporter was one of a class of newspapers that existed solely to catalog and assess types of currency during the period between the decline of the Second Bank of the United States, in 1836, and the emergence of a national currency after the Civil War. The range of notes classified in the Reporter reflects the number of entrepreneurs that stepped into that breach.

"Business owners or private citizens could use the Reporter to perform their own assessments of currency, comparing the note in front of them to the Reporter's visual description of known counterfeits, or to assess whether the Reporter thought the bank was in danger of going under anytime soon."