Oliver Pollock

Pollock's patriotism cost him everything. Born in County Tyrone in 1737, he made his money as a merchant in the West Indies and New Orleans, and in 1778 he borrowed $70,000 from Gálvez to finance George Rogers Clark's Illinois campaign. Congress and Virginia repeatedly refused to clear his war debts. He was jailed in Havana in 1784 over debts of about $150,000, released on parole in 1785, and had his debts discharged by Congress in 1791. He is often credited with inventing the dollar sign, though the claim is uncertain. He died in Mississippi in 1823.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — steps away
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.7 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.0 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Capture of Baton Rouge by Galvez, 1779 — steps away
• Alvin Batiste — steps away
• Pioneers of the Bus Boycott — steps away
• The Founding of Baton Rouge — steps away