12/03/2024
It is on this slab that President George Washington took his oath!
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln converted this building from a U. S. Custom House into a branch of the United States Independent Treasury System. The New York Sub-Treasury issued and received bonds, gold certificates, and the first "greenbacks." This was the great money warehouse of the Federal Government.
The small vault, the identical one across the Rotunda, and the L-shaped rooms behind them, were all used to store large sums of money. With business booming in the late 1870's, the Treasury Department built stronger vaults in the basement to hold gold and silver coins worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
