Appalachian Figures
On the courthouse square at Pineville, the brick façades and tight mountain valley feel a long way from Addis Ababa or Riyadh. Yet the official histories of Ethiopia’s central bank and Saudi Arabia’s monetary authority both pause over the same unlikely name: George Albert Blowers, a banker born in Pineville in 1906 who helped design new currencies in Africa, sat at the Bretton Woods conference, and later steered the Export–Import Bank of the United States.
Today Pineville’s own city history and biographical listings quietly claim him as “George Blowers, banker,” one of the town’s notable sons. This is his story, from a Bell County river town to the center of the mid twentieth century’s experiments in global finance.
From the Cumberland River to Harvard Yard
Genealogical records place George Albert Blowers’s birth on March 5, 1906, in Pineville in Bell County, Kentucky. He appears there as the son of Albert Cortelyou Blowers and Adelade Gardner Blowers, with his father about thirty years old at the time of George’s birth.
In a brief biographical sketch printed in the Congressional Record in 1961, the United States Senate summarized his early life in a few compact lines. It identified him as “Blowers, George Albert, banker,” born at Pineville on that March day in 1906, son of Albert Cortelyou and Adelade Gardner Blowers, educated at Columbia Military Academy and then at Harvard, where he completed an A.B. degree in 1928.
For a boy from a small Cumberland River town that had grown up around the old Wilderness Road ford and later taken the name Pineville, Harvard was an ambitious leap. In the 1920s the college world he entered in Cambridge looked very different from Bell County’s coal camps and courthouse square. Yet his career never quite severed the connection. Appalachian places, especially coalfield communities, would remain prominent in his thoughts and in the policy work that later touched Liberia and Ethiopia.
Upon graduating from Harvard in 1928, Blowers joined National City Bank of New York as a young banker. The timing mattered. He arrived at a major Wall Street institution in the uneasy high tide just before the Great Depression. Within a decade those skills would carry him far from Manhattan, across the Atlantic to a post that first put his name into the diplomatic record.
Liberia and the Bank of Monrovia
By 1938 Blowers had become general manager of the Bank of Monrovia in Liberia, one of the few independent African republics of the era. There he confronted a problem that would recur throughout his career: how to reshape a monetary system tied to someone else’s power.
At the time Liberia used the West African pound, a currency linked to British sterling. Under Blowers’s management, the country shifted to a new Liberian dollar pegged instead to the United States dollar. The change was more than a matter of bank ledgers. It signaled a tilt away from British financial dominance toward growing American influence, and it required persuading merchants, officials, and ordinary people to trust a new unit of money.
A wartime memorandum of conversation from the U.S. State Department captures Blowers at a turning point. On June 22, 1943, he met with Charles W. Lewis of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs and explained that he had resigned as manager of the Bank of Monrovia in order to accept a post as governor of the newly formed State Bank of Ethiopia. He told Lewis that opportunities in Liberia seemed limited and that Ethiopia offered a larger field of work.
That memorandum shows a Bell County native already comfortable navigating between private banking, colonial politics, and the diplomatic concerns of Washington and London. It also marks the beginning of the chapter for which he is best remembered in Africa.
Rebuilding Ethiopia’s Money After Occupation
Ethiopia emerged from Italian occupation during the Second World War with a battered financial system. Emperor Haile Selassie’s government created the State Bank of Ethiopia in 1942 to act as both a central and commercial bank, and, as historian Richard Pankhurst notes, placed it under an American governor: George Blowers.
Working with Ethiopian officials, Blowers helped design a new national currency that would replace the East African shilling imposed during the occupation. The birr, often called the Ethiopian dollar in English at the time, was reintroduced in 1945. Pankhurst credits the successful launch in part to U.S. material support. American silver supplied the metal for fifty cent coins whose intrinsic value helped rural Ethiopians accept new paper notes after years of disruption and distrust.
Currency historian P. J. Symes, drawing on British Foreign Office files, describes Blowers’ appointment and the decision to turn to an American banker at a moment when Ethiopia was asserting independence from earlier British tutelage. Blowers did not only run a bank. He served as adviser to Ethiopia’s Minister of Commerce and took part in wider debates about postwar economic development, often in tension with British officials who had expected to retain greater influence in Addis Ababa.
For the people of Ethiopia the practical results were more immediate. The State Bank extended branches beyond the capital, restored basic financial services, and circulated notes and coins that looked Ethiopian again. When Ethiopians today trace the institutional lineage of their central bank, lists of early governors routinely begin with Blowers’ name.
An Appalachian at Bretton Woods
Blowers’ Ethiopian service also carried him to one of the twentieth century’s most famous economic conferences. In July 1944 he traveled to Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, as part of the small Ethiopian delegation to the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference.
The printed list of delegates from the conference, preserved in archival reprints of Bretton Woods documents, names “Blatta Ephrem Tewelde Medhen, Minister to the United States; Chairman” and “George A. Blowers, Governor, State Bank of Ethiopia” under the heading ETHIOPIA.
There, the banker who had grown up under Pine Mountain took a seat in rooms dominated by figures like John Maynard Keynes and U.S. Treasury official Harry Dexter White. He did so not as an American representative, but on behalf of an African country rebuilding its sovereignty. The Bretton Woods agreements that emerged created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and set the rules for postwar exchange rates. In that story, Blowers appears as one of the quiet technicians, yet his presence underscores how far his path from Bell County had already carried him.
From Point Four to the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency
After leaving Ethiopia in the late 1940s, Blowers’ career followed the broader arc of American development policy. A biographical note in economist P. Thakkar’s study of mid century currency debates lists him as serving as deputy director of the Economic Cooperation Administration, the agency that managed the Marshall Plan for Europe.
He then headed a United Nations and International Monetary Fund mission to Libya to study that country’s currency and banking arrangements, work that fed into later decisions about the Libyan pound. Arthur N. Young, an American economist who advised the Saudi government under President Harry Truman’s Point Four Program, later recalled in an oral history interview that he recruited Blowers to Saudi Arabia after meeting him through international financial work.
Saudi royal decrees in 1952 created the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, commonly known as SAMA, to function as a central bank even though Islamic legal sensitivities discouraged using that term. Contemporary summaries of SAMA’s history note that Blowers, an American citizen, was appointed its first governor in August 1952.
During his short tenure, SAMA and the Saudi government adopted the Saudi gold sovereign as official currency and issued the first national gold coins bearing the name of King Abdulaziz. The agency opened early branches in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and introduced special “pilgrim receipts” that allowed the millions of Hajj pilgrims to deposit foreign currency and withdraw Saudi money more easily.
Once again, a banker from Pineville found himself working at the hinge between local needs and global flows. In Ethiopia it had been silver for half birr coins. In Saudi Arabia it was organizing a modern monetary authority capable of handling oil revenues and ever growing numbers of pilgrims without collapsing under the weight of paper and gold.
Director of the Export–Import Bank
By 1954 Blowers was back in Washington as a director of the Export–Import Bank of the United States, the federal agency that financed American exports and development projects abroad. Congressional documents from the early 1960s introduce him to senators as an expert on African economies, noting that he had served as governor of the State Bank of Ethiopia, as governor of SAMA, and as a leader of missions sponsored by the United Nations and the IMF.
At Ex–Im, he worked on loans in places he already knew well. A 1946 newspaper, for instance, reported his negotiations for a long term loan from the bank to Ethiopia while he was still associated with its central bank. Later scholarly work on Liberia’s “open door” economic policy cites his views as a senior Ex–Im official on the possibilities for growth there.
Blowers’ service on the Ex–Im board extended through the Eisenhower years into the beginning of the Kennedy administration. In 1961 President Kennedy reorganized the bank’s leadership, and Blowers’ name appears repeatedly in the Congressional Record during the debates over appointments and policy directions. By then he had spent more than two decades shuttling among New York, Liberia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Washington, always close to the nexus of government backed finance and developing world policy.
He retired from the bank that year and died on October 19, 1969, in Hempstead on Long Island in New York.
Remembering an Appalachian Banker of the World
In some ways George Blowers fits an old Appalachian pattern. Like many sons and daughters of the region, he left home young in search of education and opportunity and never moved back. His name does not appear in Bell County’s classic local history published in 1939, and there is no evidence that he was a public figure in Pineville as an adult.
Yet the traces of his origin remain. Wikipedia’s category pages sort him among “People from Bell County, Kentucky,” “Economists from Kentucky,” and “Businesspeople from Kentucky.” Popular summaries of Pineville’s history now routinely list him alongside musicians, admirals, and corporate executives as one of the town’s notable people.
For Appalachian historians his story opens several windows. It reminds us that mountain communities produced not only miners, teachers, and soldiers, but also international technocrats who helped rewire the global economy after the Second World War. It connects Bell County to the histories of Liberian and Ethiopian currency reforms, the politics of Bretton Woods, and the early years of Saudi oil wealth. It also points toward archival paths that could deepen the picture.
Official Bell County and Kentucky vital records preserve the original documentation of his birth and his parents’ lives. The records of the Export–Import Bank, SAMA, the IMF, and the State Bank of Ethiopia hold internal reports and correspondence that would show how he argued, what he recommended, and how local colleagues judged his work.
For now, what we can say with confidence is that a child born by the Cumberland River in 1906 grew up to help design new monies for countries emerging from empire and war. In the long list of Appalachian figures who took their mountain experience into the wider world, George Blowers deserves a place.
Sources & Further Reading
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1943, Volume IV, Document 112. Memorandum of conversation in which George Blowers informs a State Department official that he has resigned from the Bank of Monrovia to become governor of the State Bank of Ethiopia. Office of the Historian
Bretton Woods Delegates List (Document 231, Center for Financial Stability). Official printed list naming Blatta Ephrem Tewelde Medhen and George A. Blowers as Ethiopia’s delegates to the Bretton Woods conference. Center for Financial Stability+1
U.S. Congressional Record, 1961. Biographical sketch of “Blowers, George Albert, banker,” including birth in Pineville, parents’ names, and educational background, used during Export–Import Bank debates. GovInfo+1
FamilySearch, “George Albert Blowers (1906–).” Genealogical profile confirming his birth date, place in Pineville, and parents Albert C. and Adelade Gardner Blowers. FamilySearch
Arthur N. Young oral history, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. Recollections of recruiting Blowers, formerly governor of the National Bank of Ethiopia and then associated with the IMF, to serve as head of Saudi Arabia’s monetary authority. Truman Library
Richard Pankhurst, “Ethio–American Post–War Relations.” Narrative of postwar Ethiopian developments that highlights the State Bank of Ethiopia, Blowers’ role as its American governor, and U.S. provision of silver for new Ethiopian coinage. zethio.blogspot.com
P. J. Symes, “Banknotes and Banking in Abyssinia and Ethiopia” and “Issue of ‘Pilgrims’ Receipts’ in Saudi Arabia.” Currency histories that discuss Blowers’ appointment in Ethiopia and his later work at SAMA, including the introduction of pilgrim receipts. pjsymes.com.au+1
P. Thakkar, “The Currency Board Debate of the 1940s–1960s.” Scholarly paper whose appendix provides a compact curriculum vitae of George A. Blowers, outlining his progression from National City Bank to Liberia, Ethiopia, international missions, SAMA, and the Export–Import Bank. Krieger Web Services
AddisInsight, “Eleven Guardians of the Birr: Ethiopia’s Central Bank Governors Through Time.” Modern overview situating Blowers among the early expatriate governors of Ethiopia’s central banking institutions. Addis Insight
Saudi monetary history summaries on Saudipedia, Argaam, and FindSaudi, which recount SAMA’s early years and Blowers’ tenure as its first governor. Argaam+2سعوديبيديا+2
“George Blowers” entries on English Wikipedia and Completely Kentucky Wiki, along with astrology-based profile sites that compile basic biographical data such as his birth and death dates, Pineville origin, Harvard education, and main institutional posts. Wikipedia+2completely-kentucky.fandom.com+2
Pineville, Kentucky histories and demographic summaries that provide local context and list Blowers among the town’s notable people. Wikipedia+1