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National Bank Notes > North Dakota

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Dickinson, First NB, W4384
Fr. 471 $5 1882BB
Grade: PMG VG 10    

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This bank, in Stark County, was chartered on July 3, 1890 and Brown Backs were the earliest notes recorded from this often saved bank. They printed 23,356 large size and 11 are reported in the census. This note is one of only six $5 Brown Backs reported from the state. It realized $7,475 in a sale on March 10, 2012, with serious competition from numerous suitors. Excellent pen signatures of Alphonso Hilliard, President and Richard H. Johnson, Cashier. Richard Hartwell Johnson was born on February 18, 1855, at Eastford, Conn. He studied at the State University of Minnesota (B.A.) and studied law at the celebrated Ann Arbor, Mich., law school. In 1878, he came to Jamestown from St. Charles, Minn. At Jamestown he took up a preemption and tree claim and moved to Bismarck in 1884, where he resided until 1889. In that year he went west to Dickinson, and became cashier of the First National Bank of Dickinson. Mr. Johnson was a delegate to the National Republican Convention in 1908; chairman of the Republican Central Committee; member of the State Central Committee; member of the Dickinson city council and president of the library board. Alphonso Hilliard, president of the First National Bank of Dickinson, was born May 5, 1863, at Danby, Vermont. He spent the year 1884 in Bismarck in the real estate business, and then located in banking at Dickinson. Under the able management of himself and assistants Mr. Hilliard made the First National Bank one of the strongest nancial institutions in the state. Dickinson is the county seat of Stark County in the Heart River valley. The population was 17,787 at the 2010 census. This site was named Pleasant Valley Siding in 1880, but was renamed in 1881 for Wells Stoughton Dickinson (1828-1892), a land agent and politician from Malone, New York, who had visited here 1880. (His brother, Horace L. Dickinson, lived onsite to oversee its development.) The post office was established October 6, 1881 with F. H. Longley as Postmaster. It became the county seat in 1883, incorporated as a village in 1899, and became a city in 1900. Dickinson is centrally located in southwestern North Dakota, the midpoint between Fargo, North Dakota and Billings, Montana. Due to this strategic location, and the resulting regional social and economic influence, it was known for decades by the nickname Queen City of the Prairies. Reference to this nickname was used as early as 1906.

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