Grave of Oliver Pollock

Pollock bankrolled the Revolution in the Mississippi Valley and was repaid in debt. As the United States' commercial agent at New Orleans he financed George Rogers Clark's 1778 Illinois campaign, then served Governor Bernardo de Galvez as aide-de-camp against the British. He was jailed in Havana in 1784 over debts of about $150,000, and Congress did not discharge them until 1791. Pollock came to Pinckneyville in 1819 to live with his daughter Mary and her husband, Dr. Samuel Robinson. He is often credited with inventing the dollar sign.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Clark Creek Natural Area — 4.2 mi
  A 700-acre ravine preserve in the Tunica Hills with about 50 waterfalls on loess bluffs, reached by a 4.9-mile loop trail, foot traffic only.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 8.4 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 16 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 18 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

More markers nearby

• Old River — 7.2 mi
• Three Rivers Confluence — 9.8 mi
• Old River — 12 mi
• Wakefield — 12 mi