4 Dollars/Piastres = 1 Pound = 20 Shillings

The New Castle District Loan Company was one of dozens of short-lived Upper Canadian loan and district companies chartered in the 1830s under a permissive colonial framework that briefly allowed non-bank institutions to issue circulating notes. The Peterborough operation was modest — the company's paper was essentially a local credit instrument, and the triple-denomination inscription (dollars, piastres, and pounds sterling equivalent) reflects the genuinely chaotic currency arithmetic of pre-Confederation Ontario, where American dollars, British sterling, and the old Halifax currency system all circulated simultaneously and required constant mental conversion.

Most notes from these district loan companies were redeemed or cancelled within a few years; provincial banking reforms in the late 1830s and early 1840s effectively ended their note-issuing lives.