Oliver Pollock, Forgotten Financier
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Oliver Pollock is one of the least-known major funders of the American Revolution. Born in Ireland in seventeen thirty-seven, he made a fortune as a merchant in New Orleans and contributed the modern equivalent of several million dollars to the Revolutionary War effort. He believed the Mississippi River corridor was essential to America's future and worked to keep supply lines open along it, financing the Illinois Campaign led by George Rogers Clark.
The cost broke him. He was imprisoned for debt and lost most of what he had built. Pollock lived out his later years at this site in central Pennsylvania, from seventeen ninety-two to eighteen oh six, largely forgotten by the nation he had helped fund.
He died in eighteen twenty-three, finally granted a modest pension by Congress only late in life.
