Bank of Pennsylvania

The first Bank of Pennsylvania was organized on July 17, 1780 at the suggestion of Thomas Paine to fund provisions for the Continental Army.

Congress agreed and posted security in the form of bills drawn on its foreign envoys.

Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton would later observe that this was not properly a bank, since it did not lend, but rather a purchasing agency on behalf of the government.

It nonetheless provided critical support for the army following the disastrous Siege of Charleston.

[3] In 1870, the only remaining piece of the bank headquarters building—one of its iconic stone columns—was moved to Adrian, Michigan, where it was erected as a Civil War Memorial in commemoration of the 84 local soldiers who died in the American Civil War.