Homesite of Oliver Pollock

Oliver Pollock, born in County Tyrone in 1737, built a trading fortune in Spanish New Orleans and spent it on the American cause. In 1778 he introduced Bernardo de Gálvez to American envoys, later served as his aide-de-camp, and paid for George Rogers Clark's Illinois campaign. The loans ruined him: he was jailed in 1784 over debts of about $150,000, and Congress did not discharge his war debts until 1791. The dollar sign is often credited to him, though his part in its adoption was at most indirect. He died in Mississippi in 1823.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Historic New Orleans Collection — steps away
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — steps away
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Cabildo — steps away
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• Congo Square — 0.4 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.

More markers nearby

• Louis J. Dufilho — steps away
• Original Pierre Maspero's Slave Exchange — steps away
• L'Union New Orleans Tribune Building — steps away
• Faulkner House — steps away