The Failture of the Farmers and Drovers National Bank of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania
IN Greene County homes, the Farmers and Drovers National Bank was synonymous with "stability and strength." Chartered as a state bank in 1835, the "Old Bank/' as it was known to many of its patrons, successfully rode out the financial panics of those early years and was granted a "Certificate of Organization as a national bank in 1865. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, the bank, under the guidance of such able administrators as Charles A. Black, president of the institution when it became a national association, continued to develop and provide a firm economic basis for the torpescent industrial growth of the county. Starting in 1865 with a capital stock of $150,000, the bank continued to accumulate wealth until an examiner's report in July 1903 showed a total resource value of over $i,5oo,ooo. While all the other banks in Greene County collapsed in the depression years of the 1870s, the Farmers and Drovers National Bank "never suspended specie payment and never failed to pay demands upon it." "It was one of the few banks that stood the crash in Western Pennsylvania." In the late nineteenth century, when Waynesburg and Greene County experienced a "boom" due to an increased demand for the region's rich deposits of oil and gas, the directors of the bank became instru-