Albert Gallatin, America's Longest-Serving Treasury Secretary

The small river town of Point Marion sits near the farm where Albert Gallatin built his Pennsylvania home, Friendship Hill, in the seventeen nineties. Gallatin served as United States Secretary of the Treasury from eighteen oh one to eighteen fourteen, a span of thirteen years that makes him the longest-serving person in that office in American history. He helped finance the Lewis and Clark Expedition, systematically reduced the national debt before the War of eighteen twelve, and then helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent that ended that war.

Earlier, in the seventeen nineties, he had played a crucial role in calming the Whiskey Rebellion right here in western Pennsylvania, helping prevent a tax protest from escalating into armed insurrection. Swiss-born and Geneva-educated, Gallatin combined Old World financial sophistication with deep Jeffersonian ideals about public debt and democratic governance.