[1] Before it opened to receive deposits on April 3, 1839, in the basement of the Merchants' Exchange, it had already subscribed $500,000 of its capital to a New York State loan for widening and deepening the Erie Canal.
[1][failed verification] After Ward's death on November 27, 1839, John Austin Stevens took over as president of the bank.
In 1859, Robert Lenox Kennedy was elected a director and, in 1868, he began serving as the bank's fourth president.
[2] In 1900, the bank acquired the National Union Bank of New York which had been founded in 1893 by the directors of the New York Guaranty and Indemnity Company and its successor, the Guaranty Trust, and was associated with the Mutual Life Insurance Company (Mutual Life's president, Richard A. McCurdy, was a director of National Union).
Joseph C. Hendrix, a former U.S. Representative from New York, was the president of National Union from its formation until its merger into the Bank of Commerce.
[4] The consolidation plan "also has the merit, it is said, of providing for the Bank of Commerce the President which it has been looking for since W. W. Sherman retired from the place last July because of ill-health.
They involved carrying some $16,000,000 of cash, of which $12,000,000 was in gold and $67,000,000 of securities in bags and boxes from the Western National Bank Building, on the northwest corner of Nassau and Pine Streets, to the building of the National Bank of Commerce, correspondingly situated at Nassau and Cedar Streets.
[14] The new entity, which was brought together through the efforts of Myron C. Taylor (chairman of the finance committee of U.S. Steel), became the largest bank in the country with Guaranty bringing the largest trust business in the country and Commerce bringing its large commercial banking business.