4 Dollars = 1 Pound

The Gore Bank was chartered in 1835 and headquartered in Hamilton, Upper Canada — then a modest market town at the western end of Lake Ontario. The four-dollar denomination exists because Upper Canada's commercial world straddled two monetary systems simultaneously: American dollars dominated trade with the United States while British pounds governed colonial accounting. Issuing a note at the four-to-one conversion rate was a practical concession to that reality, not a monetary eccentricity.

Gore survived the financial panics of the late 1830s that destroyed several rival Upper Canadian chartered banks, and continued issuing notes through the transition to the Province of Canada after 1841. It was eventually absorbed by the Canadian Bank of Commerce in 1870.