Freedmen's Savings Bank and Trust Company

Most accounts at the Freedman's Bank held between five and fifty dollars, which is why its failure cut so deep. Chartered for formerly enslaved people in 1865, the bank held more than $3.7 million at its height in 1872. Its white officers made speculative loans, some of them corrupt, and the bank was close to collapse when Frederick Douglass was elected president in March 1874. It closed on July 2, 1874. Historians believe the failure destroyed many Black families' savings and also their trust in financial institutions.

What the plaque says

Freedmen's Savings Bank and Trust Company In 1865, the U.S. Congress chartered the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company, known as the Freedmen's Bank, to aid freed persons in their transition from enslavement to freedom. In 1870, Samuel M. Arnell and J.P. Baird established the Columbia, Tennessee branch in a room over the McGaw Livery Stable at Sixth and North Main Streets. This branch was one of four branches and the last one established in Tennessee. After several successful years, the freedmen deposited more than $57 million. In 1874, the Freedmen's Bank closed all of its branches due to mismanagement and the financial panic of 1873.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Mink Slide and East 8th Street — steps away
  Columbia's Black business and church district south of the courthouse square, where on the night of February 25, 1946 a white mob gathered and Black veterans stood guard.
• James K. Polk Home and Museum — 0.2 mi
  The 1816 brick house in Columbia where Polk practiced law and campaigned for the legislature, now a museum that also tells of the people the Polk family enslaved.
• Gordon House and Ferry Site — 15 mi
  A brick house of 1818 beside the Duck River at milepost 407.7 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, where a Chickasaw partner and a Tennessee captain ran a ferry and an inn.
• Henry Horton State Park — 19 mi
  A Duck River park on Governor Henry Horton's former farm in Marshall County, with a mill ruin from 1845, kayak floats and the grave of a governor the House declined to impeach.

More markers nearby

• The Reverend Edmund Kelly — 0.3 mi
• Columbia Military Academy — 1.3 mi
• Hood & Schofield, November 24, 1864 — 2.0 mi
• Joseph Brown — 3.1 mi