P. E. I. once boasted its own bank, the Union Bank of Prince Edward Island, which was established in 1863. Its foundation reflected a era of prosperity on the Island, when shipbuilding was at its pinnacle and infused the local economy with ocean-going trade and new settlers. The end of the Union Bank was instigated by an immense change to the way in which trade was carried out: the arrival of the railway. Perhaps overconfident from ship-building successes, the government and the bank bungled the building of the P.E.I. Railway, bringing about the financial disaster which forced the Island to enter Confederation. Cash-strapped, the Union Bank was forced to amalgamate with the Bank of Nova Scotia in 1883.
Although
the Union Bank was at one point the largest bank on the
Island, it did not have a branch in Kensington. The first
banking institution known to operate in town was the
Summerside Bank, established in nearby Summerside in
1863. A branch appears on the 1880 town atlas, situated
on Victoria Street. Like the Union Bank, it was unable to
weather the financial crises of the late nineteenth
century, and later joined with the Bank of New Brunswick,
which was the first chartered bank in Canada.
The Bank of New Brunswick
operated in Kensington from 1906 to 1913. Then, like the
Union Bank, it amalgamated with the Bank of Nova Scotia,
a larger and more stable banking institution. These
shakeups, which normally might make local investors
nervous, were made less disruptive by the fact that the
branch manager remained the same throughout the
changeover.
The Bank of Nova Scotia
has appeared in quite a number of different spots in
Kensington. Records from 1919 indicate that the bank was
at that time renting space from an influential local
merchant, Dr.
Donald Darrach. This lease was ended
prematurely when the building was burnt out in the
disastrous fire
of 1924. Eventually, in 1925, the
bank purchased a lot on the east side of Broadway Street.
A new one-storey brick building was raised, and in 1928,
the bank also built a lovely two-storey wood house for
its manager. The modest brick structure 
served as the
bank until 1964, when its new and current location was
completed on the west side of Broadway Street. Despite
these changes in location, Scotiabank has continued to
serve Kensington's banking needs without interruption
since 1913, either on one side of Broadway Street or the
other.
