The Farmers & Merchants Bank, a private bank, became the First National Bank of Blooming Grove in 1892. When it wound up in 1900, the Citizens National Bank took its place in 1903 and ran for twenty-eight years; Roger S. Loyd, who built The Columns, was its cashier and later its president. A Farmers State Bank was doing business in town by 1910 as well.

Citizens National closed in May 1931, and within weeks its business passed to a new charter, the First National Bank in Blooming Grove, with C. L. Tillman as president and T. M. George, Jr. as cashier. The Comptroller of the Currency put the bank under a conservator on 31 March 1933, in that spring's banking crisis, and into receivership on 10 November 1933, seven weeks before federal deposit insurance began.

The note is from that bank. National banks then issued their own currency: printed by the Treasury, carrying the bank's name and charter number, signed by its officers. This fifty-dollar note of the Series of 1929 is serial number A000001A, the first fifty printed for the First National Bank in Blooming Grove. In its two years the bank issued 186 notes in all, worth $11,100.

The town did not stay without a bank for long. In 1936 a group of Blooming Grove men brought the Forreston State Bank, chartered in 1906 in Ellis County and struggling there, to Blooming Grove as the First State Bank. Bruce McCormick was its first president, and T. M. “Net” Sewell and Drew Gillen were among its first directors. It held $91,377 that first year and $2 million by 1970, with B. L. Ralston, who had come as a teller in 1953, as its president.

The charter carried on as First State Bank of North Texas and, in December 2003, into Prosperity Bank. The office at 109 South Fordyce Street is still open, on the same telephone number the bank advertised in 2000.