HistoricSiteMarkers
American RevolutionEarly Republic

Samuel Meredith

Mount Pleasant Township, Wayne County, Pennsylvania

Marker Inscription

The first Treasurer of the U.S., 1789-1801, and Revolutionary patriot, spent the last years of his life at Pleasant Mount. Died here in 1817, on his estate, called Belmont.

Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission

The Story

Samuel Meredith was a Philadelphia merchant and Revolutionary patriot who served in the militia and helped finance the struggle for independence. In 1789 President Washington named him the first Treasurer of the United States, a post he held through the government's fragile founding decade. He retired to his estate, Belmont, in the quiet hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, where he died in 1817.

Why it matters

As the very first person to hold the office of U.S. Treasurer, Meredith helped establish the financial machinery of a brand-new nation still learning how to govern itself.

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Related people

  • · Samuel Meredith

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Sarah Mary Benjamin

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1992

During the Revolution, thousands of women followed the Continental Army as it marched, cooking, sewing, washing, and nursing the men who fought—labor without which the army could not have stayed in the field. Sarah Mary Benjamin was one of these camp followers, accompanying a New York unit from 1780 to 1783 and, by her own vivid later account, even standing sentinel duty at Kingsbridge and carrying food to soldiers under fire at Yorktown. Living past the age of 100, she settled in this Wayne County township after 1822, where her firsthand memories of the war made her a living link to the founding generation.

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