Dollar Savings Bank

About this property

Dollar Bank is a full-service regional savings bank serving both individuals and business customers, operating more than 90 offices throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, and Virginia. The bank's corporate headquarters is in downtown Pittsburgh alongside its Pennsylvanian regional headquarters. The Ohio headquarters is located in downtown Cleveland, and the Virginian headquarters is located in Hampton Roads. Charles A. Colton (1807–1881), a Hartford, Connecticut, native, moved to Pittsburgh with his family in 1850 to sell insurance. Mills, factories, coal mines, and other industries in the fast-growing Pittsburgh region drew thousands of people in search of work annually, Americans and immigrants alike. Colton recognized the need for a mutual bank to serve the interests of the working class. On July 19, 1855, Dollar Bank opened for business as "The Pittsburgh Dollar Savings Institution". For $1, anyone could open a savings account. The first day's deposits totaled $53, which included two dollars from Charles Colton's 10-year-old son. Colton was the only salaried employee for the first three-and-a-half years of the institution's existence. In 1858, "The Pittsburgh Dollar Savings Institution". changed its name to Dollar Savings Bank. A survey by The Daily Post in November 1880 revealed that the trade of ironworkers was the most common occupation among depositors who opened accounts that year. Artisans (stonemasons, plasterers, millwrights, and other skilled trades) were the second most common occupation, followed by porters, servers, clerks, salespeople, bookkeepers, farmers, and coal miners. Women comprised 45% of Dollar Bank's savings account holders. At the time of Colton's death in 1881, Dollar Savings Bank had more depositors and more money on deposit ($6.5 million) than any of the other 17 banks in the city. Colton had personally handled the opening of more than 10,000 savings accounts of the 65,000+ accounts in total that Dollar Savings Bank had recorded in its ledgers over the first 26 years. Dollar Bank is one of the few U.S. banks that has a mutual structure: It is owned by its depositor base customers, not by outside shareholders. Mutual savings banks in the United States date back to 1816. Originally, these institutions were organized to help the working classes because most commercial bankers at the time primarily served retail and commercial business. With no public shareholders to answer to, the bank is not fixated on stock price but on customer service. Such a structure lends itself to a more conservative business model so that the bank never participated, for instance, in the subprime lending that was so destructive to other banks during the 2008 financial crisis. Though rare in the banking industry, mutual structures are common in the insurance world and even in the investment world. The Vanguard Group of mutual funds is probably the most famous mutually-structured financial institution.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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