The Title Machinations for Phoenixville, Pennsylvania

For the past several years I have been compiling a list of the exact bank titles that appeared on all the national bank notes in the country.

One especially odd title that came to my attention was “Farmers and Mechanics National Bank of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania,” used on the later Series of 1929 notes for charter 1936.

This title makes no grammatical sense. Instead, it has the look of a typesetting error where a superfluous hyphen was accidentally inserted into the bank name. But this take was dead wrong like most conjectures made in numismatics.

Upon checking, I found that the title, complete with the odd